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    WOMEN
    -
    CHARLES BUKOWSKI
    WOMEN. Copyright Š 1978 by Charles Bukowski. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
    HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write: Special Markets Department, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    Acknowledgment is made to the editors of City Lights Anthology #4, First Person Intense, Hustler, and Rogner’s Magazin, where some of these chapters originally appeared.
    First Ecco edition published 2002. Previously published by Black Sparrow Press.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
    ISBN: 978-0-06-117759-0 (reprint)
    ISBN-10: 0-06-117759-8 (reprint)
    Women
    “Many a good man has been put under the bridge by a woman.”
    —HENRY CHINASKI
    This novel is a work of
    fiction and no character
    is intended to portray
    any person or combination
    of persons living or dead.
    1
    I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman— even on non-sexual terms—was beyond my imagination. I had a 6 year old daughter born out of wedlock. She lived with her mother and I paid child support. I had been married years before at the age of 35. That marriage lasted two and one half years. My wife divorced me. I had been in love only once. She had died of acute alcoholism. She died at 48 when I was 38. My wife had been 12 years younger than I. I believe that she too is dead now, although I’m not sure. She wrote me a long letter each Christmas for 6 years after the divorce. I never responded… .
    I’m not sure when I first saw Lydia Vance. It was about 6 years ago and I had just quit a twelve year job as a postal clerk and was trying to be a writer. I was terrified and drank more than ever. I was attempting my first novel. I drank a pint of whiskey and two six packs of beer each night while writing. I smoked cheap cigars and typed and drank and listened to classical music on the radio until dawn. I set a goal of ten pages a night but I never knew until the next day how many pages I had written. I’d get up in the morning, vomit, then walk to the front room and look on the couch to see how many pages were there. I always exceeded my ten. Sometimes there were 17, 18, 23, 25 pages. Of course, the work of each night had to be cleaned up or thrown away. It took me twenty-one nights to write my first novel.
    The owners of the court where I then lived, who lived in the back, thought I was crazy. Each morning when I awakened there would be a large brown paper bag on the porch. The contents varied but mostly the bags contained tomatoes, radishes, oranges, green onions, cans of soup, red onions. I drank beer with them every other night until 4 or 5 am. The old man would pass out and the old lady and I would hold hands and I’d kiss her now and then. I always gave her a big one at the door. She was terribly wrinkled but she couldn’t help that. She was Catholic and looked cute when she put on her pink hat and went to church on Sunday morning.
    I think I met Lydia Vance at my first poetry reading. It was at a bookstore on Kenmore Ave., The Drawbridge. Again, I was terrified. Superior yet terrified. When I walked in there was standing room only. Peter, who ran the store and was living with a black girl, had a pile of cash in front of him. “Shit,” he said to me, “if I could always pack them in like this I’d have enough money to take another trip to India!” I walked in and they began applauding. As far as poetry readings were concerned, I was about to bust my cherry.
    I read 30 minutes then called a break. I was still sober and I could feel the eyes staring at me from out of the dark. A few people came up and talked to me. Then during a lull Lydia Vance walked up. I was sitting at a table drinking beer. She put both hands on the edge of the table, bent over and looked at me. She had long brown hair, quite long, a prominent nose, and one eye didn’t quite match the other. But she projected vitality—you knew that she was there. I could feel vibrations running between us. Some of the vibrations were confused and were not good but they were there. She looked at me and I looked back. Lydia Vance had on a suede cowgirl jacket with a fringe around the neck. Her breasts were good. I told her, “I’d like to rip that fringe off your jacket—we could begin there!” Lydia walked off. It hadn’t worked. I never knew what to say to the ladies. But she had a behind. I watched that beautiful behind as she walked away. The seat of her bluejeans cradled it and I watched it as she walked away.
    I finished the second half of the reading and forgot about Lydia just as I forgot about the women I passed on the sidewalks. I took my money, signed some napkins, some pieces of paper, then left, and drove back home.
    I was still working each night on the first novel. I never started writing until 6:18 pm. That was when I used to punch in at the Terminal Annex Post Office. It was 6 pm when they arrived: Peter and Lydia Vance. I opened the door. Peter said, “Look, Henry, look what I brought you!”
    Lydia jumped up on the coffee table. Her bluejeans fit tighter than ever. She flung her long brown hair from side to side. She was insane; she was miraculous. For the first time I considered the possibility of actually making love to her. She began reciting poetry. Her own. It was very bad. Peter tried to stop her, “No! No! No rhyming poetry in Henry Chinaski’s house!”
    “Let her go, Peter!”
    I wanted to watch her buttocks. She strode up and down that old coffeetable. Then she danced. She waved her arms. The poetry was terrible, the body and the madness weren’t.
    Lydia jumped down.
    “How’d you like it, Henry?”
    “What?”
    “The poetry.”
    “Hardly.”
    Lydia stood there with her sheets of poetry in her hand. Peter grabbed her. “Let’s fuck!” he said to her. “Come on, let’s fuck!”
    She pushed him off.
    “All right,” Peter said. “Then I’m leaving!”
    “So leave. I’ve got my car,” Lydia said. “I can get back to my place.”
    Peter ran to the door. He stopped and turned. “All right, Chinaski! Don’t forget what I brought you!”
    He slammed the door and was gone. Lydia sat down on the couch, near the door. I sat about a foot away from her. I looked at her. She looked marvelous. I was afraid. I reached out and touched her long hair. The hair was magic. I pulled my hand away. “Is all that hair really yours?” I asked. I knew it was. “Yes,” she said, “it is.” I put my hand under her chin and very awkwardly I tried to turn her head toward mine. I was not confident in these situations. I kissed her lightly.
    Lydia jumped up. “I’ve got to go. I’m paying a baby sitter.”
    “Look,” I said, “stay. I’ll pay. Just stay a while.”
    “No, I can’t,” she said, “I’ve got to go.”
    She walked to the door. I followed her. She opened the door. Then she turned. I reached for her one last time. She lifted up her face and gave me the tiniest kiss. Then she pulled away and put some typed papers in my hand. The door closed. I sat on the couch with the papers in my hand and listened to her car start.
    The poems were stapled together, mimeographed and called HERRRR. I read some of them. They were interesting, full of humor and sexuality, but badly written. They were by Lydia and her three sisters—all so jolly and brave and sexy together. I threw the sheets away and I opened my pint of whiskey. It was dark outside. The radio played mostly Mozart and Brahms and the Bee.
    2
    A day or so later I got a poem in the mail from Lydia. It was a long poem and it began:
    Come out, old troll, Come out of your dark hole, old troll, Come out into the sunlight with us and Let us put daisies in your hair …
    The poem went on to tell me how good it would feel to dance in the fields with female fawn creatures who would bring me joy and true knowledge. I put the letter in a dresser drawer.
    I was awakened the next morning by a knocking on the glass panes of my front door. It was 10:30 am.
    “Go away,” I said.
    “It’s Lydia.”
    “All right. Wait a minute.”
    I put on a shirt and some pants and opened the door. Then I ran to the bathroom and vomited. I tried to brush my teeth but only vomited again—the sweetness of the toothpaste turned my stomach. I came out.
    “You’re sick,” Lydia said. “Do you want me to leave?”
    “Oh no, I’m all right. I always wake up like this.”
    Lydia looked good. The light came through the curtains and shone on her. She had an orange in her hand and was tossing it into the air. The orange spun through the sunlit morning.
    “I can’t stay,” she said, “but I want to ask you something.”
    “Sure.”
    “I’m a sculptress. I want to sculpt your head.”
    “All right.”
    “You’ll have to come to my place. I don’t have a studio. We’ll have to do it at my place. That won’t make you nervous, will it?”
    “No.”
    I wrote down her address, and instructions how to get there.
    “Try to show up by eleven in the morning. The kids come home from school in mid-afternoon and it’s distracting.”
    “I’ll be there at eleven,” I told her.
    I sat across from Lydia in her breakfast nook. Between us was a large mound of clay. She began asking questions.
    “Are your parents still alive?”
    “No.”
    “You like L.A.?”
    “It’s my favorite city.”
    “Why do you write about women the way you do?”
    “Like what?”
    “You know.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Well, I think it’s a damned shame that a man who writes as well as you do just doesn’t know anything about women.”
    I didn’t answer.
    “Damn it! What did Lisa do with … ?” She began searching the room. “Oh, little girls who run off with their mother’s tools!”
    Lydia found another one. “I’ll make this one do. Hold still now, relax but hold still.”
    I was facing her. She worked at the mound of clay with a wooden tool tipped with a loop of wire. She waved the tool at me over the mound of clay. I watched her. Her eyes looked at me.
    They were large, dark brown. Even her bad eye, the one that didn’t quite match the other, looked good. I looked back. Lydia worked. Time passed. I was in a trance. Then she said, “How about a break? Care for a beer?”
    “Fine. Yes.”
    When she got up to go to the refrigerator I followed her. She got the bottle out and closed the door. As she turned I grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to me. I put my mouth and body against hers. She held the beer bottle out at arm’s length with one hand. I kissed her. I kissed her again. Lydia pushed me away.
    “All right,” she said, “enough. We have work to do.”
    We sat back down and I drank my beer while Lydia smoked a cigarette, the clay between us. Then the doorbell rang. Lydia got up. A fat woman stood there with frantic, pleading eyes.
    “This is my sister, Glendoline.”
    “Hi.”
    Glendoline pulled up a chair and started talking. She could talk. If she was a sphinx she could have talked, if she was a stone she could have talked. I wondered when she’d get tired and leave. Even after I stopped listening it was like being battered with tiny pingpong balls. Glendoline had no concept of time or any idea that she might be intruding. She talked on and on.
    “Listen,” I said finally, “when are you going to leave?”
    Then a sister act began. They began talking to each other. They were both standing up, waving their arms at each other. The voices pitched higher. They threatened each other with physical harm. At last—near the world’s end—Glendoline did a gigantic twist of torso and flung herself out of the doorway through the large flapbang of the screen door and was gone—but still heard, ignited and bemoaning—down to her apartment in the back of the court.
    Lydia and I walked back to the breakfast nook and sat down. She picked up her sculptor’s tool. Her eyes looked into mine.
    3
    One morning a few days later I entered Lydia’s courtyard as she was walking in from the alley. She had been over to see her friend Tina who lived in an apartment house on the corner. She looked electric that morning, much like the first time she had come over, with the orange.
    “Ooooh,” she said, “you’ve got on a new shirt!”
    It was true. I had bought the shirt because I was thinking about her, about seeing her. I knew that she knew that, and was making fun of me, yet I didn’t mind.
    Lydia unlocked the door and we went inside. The clay sat in the center of the breakfast nook table under a wet cloth. She pulled the cloth off. “What do you think?”
    Lydia hadn’t spared me. The scars were there, the alcoholic nose, the monkey mouth, the eyes narrowed to slits, and there was the dumb, pleased grin of a happy man, ridiculous, feeling his luck and wondering why. She was 30 and I was over 50. I didn’t care.
    “Yes,” I said, “you’ve got me down. I like it. But it looks almost finished. I’m going to be depressed when it’s done. There have been some great mornings and afternoons.”
    “Has it interfered with your writing?”
    “No, I only write after it gets dark. I can never write in the day.”
    Lydia picked up her modeling tool and looked at me. “Don’t worry. I have a lot more work to do. I want to get this one right.”
    At her first break she got a pint of whiskey out of the refrigerator.
    “Ah,” I said.
    “How much?” she asked holding up a tall water glass.
    “Half and half.”
    She fixed the drink and I drank it right down.
    “I’ve heard about you,” she said.
    “Like what?”
    “About how you throw guys off your front porch. That you beat your women.”
    “Beat my women?”
    “Yes, somebody told me.”
    I grabbed Lydia and we went into our longest kiss ever. I held her against the edge of the sink and began rubbing my cock against her. She pushed me away but I caught her again in the center of the kitchen.
    Lydia’s hand reached for mine and pushed it down the front of her jeans and into her panties. One fingertip felt the top of her cunt. She was wet. As I continued to kiss her I worked my finger down into her cunt. Then I pulled my hand out, broke away, got the pint and poured myself another drink. I sat back down at the breakfast nook table and Lydia went around to the other side, sat down and looked at me. Then she began working on the clay again. I drank my whiskey slowly.
    “Look,” I said, “I know your tragedy.”
    “What?”
    “I know your tragedy.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Listen,” I said, “just forget it.”
    “I want to know.”
    “I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
    “I want to know what the hell you’re talking about.”
    “O.K., if you give me another drink I’ll tell you.”
    “All right.” Lydia took my empty glass and gave me half-whiskey, half-water. I drank it down again.
    “Well?” she asked.
    “Hell, you know.”
    “Know what?”
    “You’ve got a big pussy.”
    “What?”
    “It’s not uncommon. You’ve had two children.”
    Lydia sat silently working on the clay. Then she laid down her tool. She walked over to the corner of the kitchen near the back door. I watched her bend down and pull her boots off. Then she pushed down her jeans and her panties. Her cunt was right there looking at me.
    “All right, you bastard,” she said. “I’m going to show you you’re wrong.”
    I took off my shoes, pants and shorts. I got down on my knees on the linoleum floor, and then eased down on top of her, stretching out. I began to kiss her. I hardened quickly and felt myself penetrate her.
    I began to stroke … one, two, three… .
    There was a knock on the front door. It was a child’s knock— tiny fists, frantic, persistent. Lydia quickly pushed me off. “It’s Lisa! She didn’t go to school today! She’s been over at… .”Lydia jumped up and began pulling her clothes on.
    “Get dressed!” she said to me.
    I got dressed as quickly as I could. Lydia went to the door and there was her five year old daughter: “MOMMY! MOMMY! I cut my finger!”
    I wandered into the front room. Lydia had Lisa on her lap. “Oooo, let Mommy see. Oooo, let Mommy kiss your finger. Mommy will make it better!”
    “MOMMY, it hurts!”
    I looked at the cut. It was almost invisible.
    “Look,” I told Lydia finally, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    “I know.”
    Lisa looked up at me, the tears were coming and coming.
    “Lisa won’t let anything bad happen to her Momma,” Lydia said.
    I opened the door, closed the door and walked to my 1962 Mercury Comet.
    4
    I was editing a little magazine at the time, The Laxative Approach. I had two co-editors and we felt that we were printing the best poets of our time. Also some of the other kind. One of the editors was a 6-foot-2 subnormal high school drop-out, Kenneth Mulloch (black), who was supported partly by his mother and partly by his sister. The other editor was Sammy Levinson (Jewish), 27, who lived with his parents and was supported by them.
    The sheets were printed. Now we had to collate them and staple them into the covers.
    “What you do,” said Sammy, “is throw a collating party. You serve drinks and a little bullshit and let them do the work.”
    “I hate parties,” I said.
    “I’ll do the inviting,” said Sammy.
    “All right,” I said, and I invited Lydia.
    The night of the party Sammy arrived with the sheets already collated. He was a nervous sort with a head-tic and he hadn’t been able to wait to see his own poems in print. He had collated The Laxative Approach all by himself, and then stapled the covers on. Kenneth Mulloch was not to be found—he probably was either in jail or had been committed.
    People arrived. I knew very few of them. I walked to my landlady’s in the back court. She came to the door.
    “I’m having a big party, Mrs. O’Keefe. I want you and your husband to come. Plenty of beer, pretzels and chips.”
    “Oh, my God, no!”
    “What’s the matter?”
    “I’ve seen the people going in there! Those beards and all that hair and those raggedy-ass clothes! Bracelets and beads … they look like a bunch of communists! How can you stand people like that?”
    “I can’t stand those people either, Mrs. O’Keefe. We just drink beer and talk. It doesn’t mean anything.”
    “You watch them. That kind will steal the plumbing.”
    She closed the door.
    Lydia arrived late. She came through the door like an actress. The first thing I noticed was her large cowboy hat with a lavender feather pinned to the side. She didn’t speak to me but immediately sat down next to a young bookstore clerk and began an intense conversation with him. I began drinking more heavily and some of the drive and humor left my conversation. The bookstore clerk was a good enough sort, trying to be a writer. His name was Randy Evans but he was too far into Kafka to accomplish any kind of literary clarity. We had published him in The Laxative Approach rather than hurt his feelings and also to get distribution for the magazine through his bookstore.
    I drank my beer and wandered around. I walked out on the back porch, sat on the stoop in the alley and watched a large black cat trying to get into a garbage can. I walked down towards him. He leaped off the garbage can as I approached. He stood 3 or 4 feet away watching me. I took the lid off the garbage can. The stench was horrible. I puked into the can. I dropped the lid on the pavement. The cat leaped up, stood, all four feet together upon the rim of the can. He hesitated, then brilliant under a half-moon, he leaped into it all.
    Lydia was still talking to Randy, and I noticed that under the table one of her feet was touching one of Randy’s. I opened another beer.
    Sammy had the crowd laughing. I was a little better at it than he was when I wanted to get the crowd laughing but I wasn’t very good that night. There were 15 or 16 men and two women—Lydia and April. April was on ATD and fat. She was stretched out on the floor. After an hour or so she got up and left with Carl, a burned-out speed freak. That left 15 or 16 men and Lydia. I found a pint of scotch in the kitchen, took it out on the back porch, and had a bite now and then.
    The men began leaving gradually as the night went on. Even Randy Evans left. Finally there was only Sammy, Lydia and myself. Lydia was talking to Sammy. Sammy said some funny things. I was able to laugh. Then he said he had to go.
    “Please don’t go, Sammy,” said Lydia.
    “Let the kid go,” I said.
    “Yeah, I gotta go,” said Sammy.
    After Sammy left Lydia said, “You didn’t have to drive him away. Sammy’s funny, Sammy’s really funny. You hurt his feelings.”
    “But I want to talk to you alone, Lydia.”
    “I enjoy your friends. I don’t get to meet all kinds of people the way you do. I like people!”
    “I don’t.”
    “I know you don’t. But I do. People come to see you. Maybe if they didn’t come to see you you’d like them better.”
    “No, the less I see them the better I like them.”
    “You hurt Sammy’s feelings.”
    “Oh shit, he’s gone home to his mother.”
    “You’re jealous, you’re insecure. You think I want to go to bed with every man I talk to.”
    “No I don’t. Listen, how about a little drink?”
    I got up and mixed her one. Lydia lit a long cigarette and sipped at her drink. “You sure look good in that hat,” I said. “That purple feather is something.”
    “It’s my father’s hat.”
    “Won’t he miss it?”
    “He’s dead.”
    I pulled Lydia over to the couch and gave her a long kiss. She told me about her father. He had died and left all 4 sisters a bit of money. That had enabled them to be independent and had enabled Lydia to divorce her husband. She also told me she’d had some kind of breakdown and spent time in a madhouse. I kissed her again. “Look,” I said, “let’s lay down on the bed. I’m tired.”
    To my surprise she followed me into the bedroom. I stretched out on the bed and felt her sit down. I closed my eyes and could tell she was pulling her boots off. I heard one boot hit the floor, then the other. I began to undress on the bed. I reached up and shut off the overhead light. I continued undressing. We kissed some more.
    “How long has it been since you’ve had a woman?”
    “Four years.”
    “Four years?”
    “Yes.”
    “I think you deserve some love,” she said. “I had a dream about you. I opened your chest like a cabinet, it had doors, and when I opened the doors I saw all kinds of soft things inside you—teddy bears, tiny fuzzy animals, all these soft, cuddly things. Then I had a dream about this other man. He walked up to me and handed me some pieces of paper. He was a writer. I took the pieces of paper and looked at them. And the pieces of paper had cancer. His writing had cancer. I go by my dreams. You deserve some love.”
    We kissed again.
    “Listen,” she said, “after you stick that thing inside me, pull it out just before you come. O.K.?”
    “I understand.”
    I climbed on top of her. It was good. It was something happening, something real, and with a girl 20 years younger than I was and really, after all, beautiful. I did about 10 strokes—and came inside of her.
    She leaped up.
    “You son-of-a-bitch! You came inside of me!”
    “Lydia, it’s been so long … it felt so good … I couldn’t help it. It sneaked up on me! Honest to Christ, I couldn’t help it.”
    She ran into the bathroom and let the water run into the tub. She stood in front of the mirror running a comb through her long brown hair. She was truly beautiful.
    “You son-of-a-bitch! God, what a dumb high school trick. That’s high school shit! And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time! Well, we’re shackjobs now! We’re shackjobs now!”
    I moved toward her in the bathroom. “Lydia, I love you.”
    “Get the hell away from me!”
    She pushed me out, closed the door, and I stood out in the hall, listening to the bath water run.
    5
    I didn’t see Lydia for a couple of days, although I did manage to phone her 6 or 7 times during that period. Then the weekend arrived. Her ex-husband, Gerald, always took the children over the weekend.
    I drove up to her court about 11 am that Saturday morning and knocked. She was in tight bluejeans, boots, orange blouse. Her eyes seemed a darker brown than ever and in the sunlight, as she opened the door, I noticed a natural red in her dark hair. It was startling. She allowed me to kiss her, then she locked the door behind us and we went to my car. We had decided on the beach—not for bathing—it was mid-winter—but for something to do.
    We drove along. It felt good having Lydia in the car with me.
    “That was some party,” she said. “You call that a collating party? That was a copulating party, that’s what that was. A copulating party!”
    I drove with one hand and rested the other on her inner thigh. I couldn’t help myself. Lydia didn’t seem to notice. As I drove along the hand slid down between her legs. She went on talking. Suddenly she said, “Take you hand off. That’s my pussy!”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    Neither of us said anything until we reached the parking lot at Venice beach. “You want a sandwich and a Coke or something?” I asked. “All right,” she said.
    We went into the small Jewish delicatessen to get the things and we took them to a knoll of grass that overlooked the sea. We had sandwiches, pickles, chips and soft drinks. The beach was almost deserted and the food tasted fine. Lydia was not talking. I was amazed at how quickly she ate. She ripped into her sandwich with a savagery, took large swallows of Coke, ate half a pickle in one bite and reached for a handful of potato chips. I am, on the contrary, a very slow eater.
    Passion, I thought, she has passion.
    “How’s that sandwich?” I asked.
    “Pretty good. I was hungry.”
    “They make good sandwiches. Do you want anything else?”
    “Yes, I’d like a candy bar.”
    “What kind?”
    “Oh, any kind. Something good.”
    I took a bite of my sandwich, a swallow of Coke, putthem down and walked over to the store. I bought two candy bars so that she might have a choice. As I walked back a tall black man was moving toward the knoll. It was a chilly day but he had his shirt off and he had a very muscular body. He appeared to be in his early twenties. He walked very slowly and erect. He had a long slim neck and a gold earring hung from the left ear. He passed in front of Lydia, along the sand on the ocean side of the knoll. I came up and sat down beside Lydia.
    “Did you see that guy?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Jesus Christ, here I am with you, you’re twenty years older than I am. I could have something like that. What the hell’s wrong with me?”
    “Look. Here are a couple of candy bars. Take one.”
    She took one, ripped the paper off, took a bite and watched the young black man as he walked away along the shore.
    “I’m tired of the beach,” she said, “let’s go back to my place.”
    We remained apart a week. Then one afternoon I was over at Lydia’s place and we were on her bed, kissing. Lydia pulled away.
    “You don’t know anything about women, do you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, I can tell by reading your poems and stories that you just don’t know anything about women.”
    “Tell me more.”
    “Well, I mean for a man to interest me he’s got to eat my pussy. Have you ever eaten pussy?”
    “No.”
    “You’re over 50 years old and you’ve never eaten pussy?”
    “No.”
    “It’s too late.”
    “Why?”
    “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
    “Sure you can.”
    “No, it’s too late for you.”
    “I’ve always been a slow starter.”
    Lydia got up and walked into the other room. She came back with a pencil and a piece of paper. “Now, look, I want to show you something.” She began to draw on the paper. “Now, this is a cunt, and here is something you probably don’t know about—the clit. That’s where the feeling is. The clit hides, you see, it comes out now and then, it’s pink and very sensitive. Sometimes it will hide from you and you have to find it, you just touch it with the tip of your tongue. …”
    “O.K.,” I said, “I’ve got it.”
    “I don’t think you can do it. I tell you, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
    “Let’s take our clothes off and lay down.”
    We undressed and stretched out. I began kissing Lydia. I dropped from the lips to the neck, then down to the breasts. Then I was down at the bellybutton. I moved lower.
    “No you can’t,” she said. “Blood and pee come out of there, think of it, blood and pee. …”
    I got down there and began licking. She had drawn an accurate picture for me. Everything was where it was supposed to be. I heard her breathing heavily, then moaning. It excited me. I got a hard-on. The clit came out but it wasn’t exactly pink, it was purplish-pink. I teased the clit. Juices appeared and mixed with the cunt hairs. Lydia moaned and moaned. Then I heard the front door open and close. I heard footsteps. I looked up. A small black boy about 5 years old stood beside the bed.
    “What the hell do you want?” I asked him.
    “You got any empty bottles?” he asked me.
    “No, I don’t have any empty bottles,” I told him.
    He walked out of the bedroom, into the front room, out the front door and was gone.
    “God,” said Lydia, “I thought the front door was locked. That was Bonnie’s little boy.”
    Lydia got up and locked the front door. She came back and stretched out. It was about 4 pm on a Saturday afternoon.
    I ducked back down.
    6
    Lydia liked parties. And Harry was a party-giver. So we were on our way to Harry Ascot’s. Harry was the editor of Retort, a little magazine. His wife wore long see-through dresses, showed her panties to the men, and went barefoot.
    “The first thing I liked about you,” said Lydia, “was that you didn’t have a t.v. in your place. My ex-husband looked at t.v. every night and all through the weekend. We even had to arrange our lovemaking to fit the t.v. schedule.”
    “Umm… .”
    “Another thing I liked about your place was that it was filthy. Beer bottles all over the floor. Lots of trash everywhere. Dirty dishes, and a shit-ring in your toilet, and the crud in your bathtub. All those rusty razorblades laying around the bathroom sink. I knew that you would eat pussy.”
    “You judge a man according to his surroundings, right?”
    “Right. When I see a man with a tidy place I know there’s something wrong with him. And if it’s too tidy, he’s a fag.”
    We drove up and got out. The apartment was upstairs. The music was loud. I rang the bell. Harry Ascot answered the door. He had a gentle and generous smile. “Come in,” he said.
    The literary crowd was in there drinking wine and beer, talking, gathered in clusters. Lydia was excited. I looked around and sat down. Dinner was about to be served. Harry was a good fisherman, he was a better fisherman than he was a writer, and a much better fisherman than he was an editor. The Ascots lived on fish while waiting for Harry’s talents to start bringing in some money.
    Diana, his wife, came out with the plates of fish and passed them around. Lydia sat next to me.
    “Now,” she said, “this is how you eat a fish. I’m a country girl. Watch me.”
    She opened that fish, she did something with her knife to the backbone. The fish was in two neat pieces.
    “Oh, I really liked that,” said Diana. “Where did you say you were from?”
    “Utah. Muleshead, Utah. Population ioo. I grew up on a ranch. My father was a drunk. He’s dead now. Maybe that’s why I’m with him. …” She jerked a thumb at me.
    We ate.
    After the fish was consumed Diana carried the bones away. Then there was chocolate cake and strong (cheap) red wine.
    “Oh, this cake is good,” said Lydia, “can I have another piece?”
    “Sure, darling,” said Diana.
    “Mr. Chinaski,” said a dark-haired girl from across the room, “I’ve read translations of your books in Germany. You’re very popular in Germany.”
    “That’s nice,” I said. “I wish they’d send me some royalties… .”
    “Look,” said Lydia, “let’s not talk about literary crap. Let’s do something!” She leaped up and did a bump and a grind. “LET’S DANCE!”
    Harry Ascot put on his gentle and generous smile and walked over and turned up the stereo. He turned it up as loud as it would go.
    Lydia danced around the room and a young blond boy with ringlets glued to his forehead joined her. They began dancing together. Others got up and danced. I sat there.
    Randy Evans was sitting next to me. I could see he was watching Lydia too. He began talking. He talked and he talked. Thankfully I couldn’t hear him, the stereo was too loud.
    I watched Lydia dance with the boy with the ringlets. Lydia could move it. Her movements lurked upon the sexual. I looked at the other girls and they didn’t seem to be dancing that way; but, I thought, that’s only because I know Lydia and I don’t know them.
    Randy kept on talking even though I didn’t answer. The dance ended and Lydia came back and sat down next to me.
    “Ooooh, I’m pooped! I think I’m out of shape.”
    Another record dropped into place and Lydia got up and joined the boy with the golden ringlets. I kept drinking beer and wine.
    There were many records. Lydia and the boy danced and danced—center stage as the others moved around them, each dance more intimate than the last.
    I kept drinking the beer and the wine.
    A wild loud dance was in progress… . The boy with the golden ringlets raised both hands above his head. Lydia pressed against him. It was dramatic, erotic. They held their hands high over their heads and pressed their bodies together. Body against body. He kicked his feet back, one at a time. Lydia imitated him. They stared into each other’s eyes. I had to admit they were good. The record went on and on. Finally, it ended.
    Lydia came back and sat down next to me. “I’m really pooped,” she said.
    “Look, I said, “I think I’ve had too much to drink. Maybe we ought to get out of here.”
    “I’ve watched you pouring it down.”
    “Let’s go. There’ll be other parties.”
    We got up to leave. Lydia said something to Harry and Diana. When she came back we walked toward the door. As I opened it the boy with the golden ringlets came up to me. “Hey, man, what do you think of me and your girl?”
    “You’re O.K.”
    When we got outside I began vomiting, all the beer and the wine came up. It poured and splattered into the brush—across the sidewalk—a gusher in the moonlight. Finally I straightened up and wiped my mouth with my hand.
    “That guy worried you, didn’t he?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “It almost seemed like a fuck, maybe better.”
    “It didn’t mean anything, it was just dancing.”
    “Suppose that I grabbed a woman on the street like that? Would music make it all right?”
    “You don’t understand. Each time I finished dancing I came back and sat down next to you.”
    “O.K., O.K.,” I said, “wait a minute.”
    I puked up another gusher on somebody’s dying brush. We walked down the hill out of the Echo Park district toward Hollywood Boulevard.
    We got into the car. It started and we drove west down Hollywood toward Vermont.
    “You know what we call guys like you?” asked Lydia.
    “No.”
    “We call them,” she said, “party-poopers.”
    7
    We came in low over Kansas City, the pilot said the temperature was 20 degrees, and there I was in my thin California sports coat and shirt, lightweight pants, summer stockings, and holes in my shoes. As we landed and taxied toward the ramp everybody was reaching for overcoats, gloves, hats, mufflers. I let them all get off and then climbed down the portable stairway. There was Frenchy leaning against a building and waiting. Frenchy taught drama and collected books, mostly mine. “Welcome to Kansas Shitty, Chinaski!” he said and handed me a bottle of tequila. I took a good gulp and followed him into the parking lot. I had no baggage, just a portfolio full of poems. The car was warm and pleasant and we passed the bottle.
    The roadways were frozen over with ice.
    “Not everybody can drive on this fucking kind of ice,” said Frenchy. “You got to know what you’re doing.”
    I opened the portfolio and began reading Frenchy a love poem Lydia had handed me at the airport:
    “… your purple cock curved like a …
    “… when I squeeze your pimples, bullets of puss like sperm …”
    “Oh SHIT!” hollered Frenchy. The car went into a spin. Frenchy worked at the steering wheel.
    “Frenchy,” I said, lifting the tequila bottle and taking a hit, “we’re not going to make it.”
    We spun off the road and into a three foot ditch which divided the highway. I handed him the bottle.
    We got out of the car and climbed out of the ditch. We thumbed passing cars, sharing what was left of the bottle. Finally a car stopped. A man in his mid-twenties, drunk, was at the wheel. “Where you fellows going?”
    “A poetry reading,” said Frenchy.
    “A poetry reading?”
    “Yeah, at the University.”
    “All right, get in.”
    He was a liquor salesman. The back seat of his car was packed with cases of beer.
    “Have a beer,” he said, “and get me one too.”
    He got us there. We drove right up into the campus center and parked on the lawn in front of the auditorium. We were only 15 minutes late. I got out, vomited, then we all walked in together. We had stopped for a pint of vodka to get me through the reading.
    I read about 20 minutes, then put the poems down. “This shit bores me,” I said, “let’s talk to each other.”
    I ended up screaming things at the audience and they screamed back at me. That audience wasn’t bad. They were doing it for free. After about another 30 minutes a couple of professors got me out of there. “We’ve got a room for you, Chinaski,” one of them said, “in the women’s dormitory.”
    “In the women’s dorm?”
    “That’s right, a nice room.”
    … It was true. Up on the third floor. One of the profs had brought a fifth of whiskey. Another gave me a check for the reading, plus air fare, and we sat around and drank the whiskey and talked. I blacked out. When I came to everybody was gone and there was half a fifth left. I sat there drinking and thinking, hey, you’re Chinaski, Chinaski the legend. You’ve got an image. Now you’re in the women’s dorm. Hundreds of women in this place, hundreds of them.
    All I had on were my shorts and stockings. I walked out into the hall up to the nearest door. I knocked.
    “Hey, I’m Henry Chinaski, the immortal writer! Open up! I wanna show you something!”
    I heard the girls giggling.
    “O.K. now,” I said, “how many of you are in there? 2? 3? It doesn’t matter. I can handle 3! No problem! Hear me? Open up! I have this HUGE purple thing! Listen, I’ll beat on the door with it!”
    I took my fist and beat on the door. They kept giggling.
    “So. You’re not going to let Chinaski in, eh? Well, FUCK YOU!”
    I tried the next door. “Hey, girls! This is the best poet of the last 18 hundred years! Open the door! I’m gonna show you something! Sweet meat for your vaginal lips!”
    I tried the next door.
    I tried all the doors on that floor and then I walked down the stairway and worked all the doors on the second floor and then all the doors on the first. I had the whiskey with me and I got tired. It seemed like hours since I had left my room. I drank as I walked along. No luck.
    I had forgotten where my room was, which floor it was on. All I wanted, finally, was to get back to my room. I tried all the doors again, this time silently, very conscious of my shorts and stockings. No luck. “The greatest men are the most alone.”
    Back on the third floor I twisted a doorknob and the door opened. There was my portfolio of poems … the empty drinking glasses, ashtrays full of cigarette stubs … my pants, my shirt, my shoes, my coat. It was a wonderful sight. I closed the door, sat down on the bed and finished the bottle of whiskey that I had been carrying with me.
    I awakened. It was daylight. I was in a strange clean place with two beds, drapes, t.v., bath. It appeared to be a motel room. I got up and opened the door. There was snow and ice out there. I closed the door and looked around. There was no explanation. I had no idea where I was. I was terribly hung over and depressed. I reached for the telephone and placed a long distance call to Lydia in Los Angeles.
    “Baby, I don’t know where I am!”
    “I thought you went to Kansas City?”
    “I did. But now I don’t know where I am, you understand? I opened the door and looked and there’s nothing but frozen roads, ice, snow!”
    “Where were you staying?”
    “Last thing I remember I had a room in the women’s dorm.”
    “Well, you probably made an ass out of yourself and they moved you to a motel. Don’t worry. Somebody will show up to take care of you.”
    “Christ, don’t you have any sympathy for my situation?”
    “You made an ass out of yourself. You generally always make an ass out of yourself.”
    “What do you mean ‘generally always’?”
    “You’re just a lousy drunk,” Lydia said. “Take a warm shower.”
    She hung up.
    I walked over to the bed and stretched out. It was a nice motel room but it lacked character. I’d be damned if I’d take a shower. I thought of turning on the t.v.
    I slept finally… .
    There was a knock on the door. Two bright young college boys stood there, ready to take me to the airport. I sat on the edge of the bed putting on my shoes. “We got time for a couple at the airport bar before take-off?” I asked.
    “Sure, Mr. Chinaski,” one of them said, “anything you want.” “O.K.” I said. “Then let’s get the fuck out of here.”
    8
    I got back, made love to Lydia several times, got in a fight with her, and left L. A. International late one morning to give a reading in Arkansas. I was lucky enough to have a seat by myself. The flight captain announced himself, if I heard correctly, as Captain Winehead. When the stewardess came by I ordered a drink.
    I was certain I knew one of the stewardesses. She lived in Long Beach, had read some of my books, had written me a letter enclosing her photo and phone number. I recognized her from the photo. I had never gotten around to meeting her but I called her a number of times and one drunken night we had screamed at each other over the phone.
    She stood up front trying not to notice me as I stared at her behind and her calves and her breasts.
    We had lunch, saw the Game of the Week, the after-lunch wine burned my throat, and I ordered two Bloody Marys.
    When we got to Arkansas I transferred to a small two engine job. When the propellers started up the wings began to vibrate and shake. They looked like they might fall off. We lifted off and the stewardess asked if anybody wanted a drink. By then we all needed one. She staggered and wobbled up and down the aisle selling drinks. Then she said, loudly, “DRINK UP! WE’RE GOING TO LAND!” We drank up and landed. Fifteen minutes later we were up again. The stewardess asked if anybody wanted a drink. By then we all needed one. Then she said, loudly, “DRINK UP! WE’RE GOING TO LAND!”
    Professor Peter James and his wife, Selma, were there to meet me. Selma looked like a movie starlet but with much more class.
    “You’re looking great,” said Pete.
    “Your wife’s looking great.”
    “You’ve got two hours before the reading.”
    Pete drove to their place. It was a split-level house with the guestroom on the lower level. I was shown my bedroom, downstairs. “You want to eat?” Pete asked. “No, I feel like I’m going to vomit.” We went upstairs.
    Backstage, just before the reading, Pete filled a water pitcher with vodka and orange juice. “An old woman runs the readings. She’d cream in her panties if she knew you were drinking. She’s a nice old girl but she still thinks poetry is about sunsets and doves in flight.”
    I went out and read. S.R.O. The luck was holding. They were like any other audience: they didn’t know how to handle some of the good poems, and during others they laughed at the wrong times. I kept reading and pouring from the water pitcher.
    “What’s that you’re drinking?”
    “This,” I said, “is orange juice mixed with life.”
    “Do you have a girlfriend?”
    “I’m a virgin.”
    “Why did you seek to become a writer?”
    “Next question, please.”
    I read some more. I told them I had flown in with Captain Winehead and had seen the Game of the Week. I told them that when I was in good spiritual shape I ate off one dish and then washed it immediately. I read some more poems. I read poems until the water pitcher was empty. Then I told them the reading was over. There was a bit of autographing and we went to a party at Pete’s house… .
    I did my Indian dance, my Belly dance and my Broken-Ass-in-the-Wind dance. It’s hard to drink when you dance. And it’s hard to dance when you drink. Peter knew what he was doing. He had couches and chairs lined up to separate the dancers from the drinkers. Each could go their own way without bothering the other.
    Pete walked up. He looked around the room at the women. “Which one do you want?” he asked.
    “Is it that easy?”
    “It’s just southern hospitality.”
    There was one I had noticed, older than the others, with protruding teeth. But her teeth protruded perfectly—pushing the lips out like an open passionate flower. I wanted my mouth on that mouth. She wore a short skirt and her pantyhose revealed good legs that kept crossing and uncrossing as she laughed and drank and tugged at her skirt which would just not stay down. I sat next to her. “I’m—” I started to say… .
    “I know who you are. I was at your reading.”
    “Thanks. I’d like to eat your pussy. I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ll drive you crazy.”
    “What do you think of Allen Ginsberg?”
    “Look, don’t get me off the track. I want your mouth, your legs, your ass.”
    “All right,” she said.
    “See you soon. I’m in the bedroom downstairs.”
    I got up, left her, had another drink. A young guy—at least 6 feet 6 inches tall—walked up to me. “Look, Chinaski, I don’t believe all that shit about you living on skidrow and knowing all the dope dealers, pimps, whores, junkies, horse players, fighters and drunks. …”
    “It’s partly true.”
    “Bullshit,” he said and walked off. A literary critic.
    Then this blonde, about 19, with rimless glasses and a smile walked up. The smile never left. “I want to fuck you,” she said. “It’s your face.”
    “What about my face?”
    “It’s magnificent. I want to destroy your face with my cunt.”
    “It might be the other way around.”
    “Don’t bet on it.”
    “You’re right. Cunts are indestructible.”
    I went back to the couch and started playing with the legs of the one with the short skirt and moist flower lips whose name was Lillian.
    The party ended and I went downstairs with Lilly. We undressed and sat propped against the pillows drinking vodka and vodka mix. There was a radio and the radio played. Lilly told me that she had worked for years to put her husband through college and then when he had gotten his professorship he had divorced her.
    “That’s shaggy,” I said.
    “You been married?”
    “Yes.”
    “What happened?”
    ‘“Mental cruelty,’ according to the divorce papers.”
    “Was it true?” she asked.
    “Of course: both ways.”
    I kissed Lilly. It was as good as I had imagined it would be. The flower mouth was open. We clasped, I sucked on her teeth. We broke.
    “I think you,” she said, looking at me with wide and beautiful eyes, “are one of the two or three best writers of today.”
    I switched off the bed lamp fast. I kissed her some more, played with her breasts and body, then went down on her. I was drunk, but I think I did O.K. But after that I couldn’t do it the other way. I rode and rode and rode. I was hard but I couldn’t come. Finally I rolled off and went to sleep… .
    In the morning Lilly was flat on her back, snoring. I went to the bathroom, pissed, brushed my teeth and washed my face. Then I crawled back into bed. I turned her toward me and started playing with her parts. I am always very horny when hungover—not horny to eat but horny to blast. Fucking was the best cure for hangovers. It got all the parts ticking again. Her breath was so bad that I didn’t want the flower mouth. I mounted. She gave a small groan. For me, it was very good. I don’t think I gave her more than twenty strokes before I came.
    After a while I heard her get up and walk to the bathroom. Lillian. By the time she came back I had turned my back to her and was nearly asleep.
    After 15 minutes she got out of bed and began to dress.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to take my kids to school.”
    Lillian closed the door and ran up the stairway.
    I got up, walked to the bathroom, and stared for a while at my face in the mirror.
    At ten am I went upstairs for breakfast. I found Pete and Selma. Selma looked great. How did one get a Selma? The dogs of this world never ended up with a Selma. Dogs ended up with dogs. Selma served us breakfast. She was beautiful and one man owned her, a college professor. That was not quite right, somehow. Educated hotshot smoothies. Education was the new god, and educated men the new plantation masters.
    “It was a damned good breakfast,” I told them. “Thanks much.”
    “How was Lilly?” Pete asked.
    “Lilly was very good.”
    “You’ve got to read again tonight, you know. It’ll be at a smaller college, more conservative.
    “All right. I’ll be careful.”
    “What are you going to read?”
    “Old stuff, I guess.”
    We finished our coffee and walked into the front room and sat down. The phone rang, Pete answered, talked, then turned to me. “Guy from the local paper wants to interview you. What’ll I tell him?”
    “Tell him all right.”
    Pete relayed the answer, then walked over and picked up my latest book and a pen. “I thought you might want to write something in this for Lilly.”
    I opened the book to the title page. “Dear Lilly,” I wrote. “You will always be part of my life! …
    Henry Chinaski.”
    9
    Lydia and I were always fighting. She was a flirt and it irritated me. When we ate out I was sure she was eyeballing some man across the room. When my male friends came by to visit and Lydia was there I could hear her conversation become intimate and sexual. She always sat very close to my friends, positioning herself as near them as possible. It was my drinking that irritated Lydia. She loved sex and my drinking got in the way of our lovemaking. “Either you’re too drunk to do it at night or too sick to do it in the morning,” she’d say. Lydia would go into a rage if I even drank a bottle of beer in front of her. We split up at least once a week— “Forever”—but always managed to make up, somehow. She had finished sculpting my head and had given it to me. When we’d split I’d put the head in my car next to me on the front seat, drive it over to her place and leave it outside her door on the porch. Then I’d go to a phone booth, ring hervup and say, “Your goddamned head is outside the door!” That head went back and forth… .
    We had just split again and I had dropped off the head. I was drinking, a free man again. I had a young friend, Bobby, a rather bland kid who worked in a porno bookstore and was a photographer on the side. He lived a couple of blocks away. Bobby was having trouble with himself and with his wife, Valerie. He phoned one evening and said he was bringing Valerie over to stay the night with me. It sounded fine. Valerie was 22, absolutely lovely, with long blond hair, mad blue eyes and a beautiful body. Like Lydia, she had also spent some time in a madhouse. After a while I heard them drive up on the lawn in front of my court. Valerie got out. I remembered Bobby telling me that when he first introduced Valerie to his parents they had commented on her dress—that they liked it very much—and she had said, “Yeah, well how about the rest of me?” She had pulled her dress up over her hips. And didn’t have any panties on.
    Valerie knocked. I heard Bobby drive off. I let her in. She looked fine. I poured two scotch and waters. Neither of us spoke. We drank those and I poured two more. After that I said, “Come on, let’s make a bar.” We got into my car. The Glue Machine was right around the corner. I had been 86’d earlier that week but nothing was said when we walked in. We got a table and ordered drinks. We still didn’t talk. I just looked into those mad blue eyes. We were sitting side by side and I kissed her. Her mouth was cool and open. I kissed her again and our legs pressed together. Bobby had a nice wife. Bobby was crazy to pass her around.
    We decided on dinner. We each ordered a steak and we drank and we kissed while we waited. The barmaid said, “Oh, you’re in love!” and we both laughed. When the steaks came Valerie said, “I don’t want to eat mine.” “I don’t want to eat mine either,” I said.
    We drank for another hour and then decided to go back to my place. As I drove the car up on the front lawn I saw a woman in the driveway. It was Lydia. She had an envelope in her hand. I got out of the car with Valerie and Lydia looked at us. “Who’s that?” asked Valerie. “The woman I love,” I told her.
    “Who’s the bitch?” screamed Lydia.
    Valerie turned and ran down the sidewalk. I could hear her high heels on the pavement. “Come on in,” I told Lydia. She followed me in.
    “I came here to give this letter to you and it looks like I came at the right time. Who was she?”
    “Bobby’s wife. We’re just friends.”
    “You were going to fuck her, weren’t you?”
    “Now look, I told her I love you.”
    “You were going to fuck her, weren’t you?”
    “Now look, baby …”
    Suddenly she shoved me. I was standing in front of the coffee table which was in front of the couch. I fell backward over the coffee table and into the space between the table and the couch. I heard the door slam. And as I got up I heard the engine of Lydia’s car start. Then she drove off.
    Son-of-a-bitch, I thought, one minute I’ve got two women and the next I’ve got none.
    10
    I was surprised the next morning when April knocked on the door. April was the one on ATD who had been at Harry Ascot’s party and who had left with the speed freak. It was 11 am. April came in and sat down.
    “I’ve always admired your work,” she said.
    I got her a beer and got myself a beer.
    “God is a hook in the sky,” she said.
    “All right,” I said.
    April was on the heavy side but not too fat. She had big hips and a large ass and her hair fell straight down. There was something about the size of her—rugged, like she could handle an ape. Her mental deficiency was attractive to me because she didn’t play games. She crossed her legs, showing me enormous white flanks.
    “I planted tomato seeds down in the basement of the apartment house I live in,” she said.
    “I’ll take some when they come up,” I said.
    “I’ve never had a driver’s license,” April said. “My mother lives in New Jersey.”
    “My mother’s dead,” I said. I walked over and sat next to her on the couch. I grabbed her and kissed her. While I was kissing her she looked right into my eyes. I broke off. “Let’s fuck,” I said.
    “I have an infection,” said April.
    “What?”
    “It’s sort of a fungus. Nothing serious.”
    “Could I catch it?”
    “It’s kind of a milky discharge.”
    “Could I catch it?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Let’s fuck.”
    “I don’t know if I want to fuck.”
    “It’ll feel good. Let’s go into the bedroom.”
    April walked into the bedroom and started taking off her clothes. I took mine off. We got under the sheets. I began playing with her parts and kissing her. I mounted her. It was very strange. As if her cunt ran from side to side. I knew I was in there, it felt like I was in there, but I kept slipping sideways, to the left. I kept humping. It was exciting like that. I finished and rolled off.
    Later I drove her to her apartment and we went up. We talked for a long while and I left only after making note of the apartment number and the address. As I walked through the lobby I recognized the apartment house lock boxes. I had delivered mail there many times as a mailman. I went out to my car and drove off.
    11
    Lydia had two children; Tonto, a boy of 8, and Lisa, the little girl of 5 who had interrupted our first fuck. We were together at the table one night eating dinner. Things were going well between Lydia and me and I stayed for dinner almost every night, then slept with Lydia and left about 11 am the next morning to go back to my place to check the mail and write. The children slept in the next room on a waterbed. It was an old, small house which Lydia rented from an ex-Japanese wrestler now into real estate. He was obviously interested in Lydia. That was all right. It was a nice old house.
    “Tonto,” I said as we were eating, “you know that when your mother screams at night I’m not beating her. You know who’s really in trouble.”
    “Yes, I know.”
    “Then why don’t you come in and help me?”
    “Uh-uh. I know her.”
    “Listen, Hank,” said Lydia, “don’t turn my kids against me.”
    “He’s the ugliest man in the world,” said Lisa.
    I liked Lisa. She was going to be a sexpot some day, a sexpot with personality.
    After dinner Lydia and I went to our bedroom and stretched out. Lydia was into blackheads and pimples. I had a bad complexion. She moved the lamp down near my face and began. I liked it.
    It made me tingle and sometimes I got a hard-on. Very intimate. Sometimes between squeezes Lydia would give me a kiss. She always worked on my face first and then moved on to my back and chest.
    “You love me?”
    “Yeh.”
    “Oooh, look at this one!”
    It was a blackhead with a long yellow tail.
    “It’s nice,” I said.
    She was laying flat on top of me. She stopped squeezing and looked at me. “I’ll put you in your grave, you fat fuck!”
    I laughed. Then Lydia kissed me.
    “I’ll put you back in the madhouse,” I told her.
    “Turn over. Let me get your back.”
    I turned over. She squeezed at the back of my neck. “Oooh, there’s a good one! It shot out! It hit me in the eye!”
    “You ought to wear goggles.”
    “Let’s have a little Henry!” “Think of it, a little Henry Chinaski!”
    “Let’s wait a while.”
    “I want a baby now!”
    “Let’s wait.”
    “All we do is sleep and eat and lay around and make love. We’re like slugs. Slug-love, I call it.”
    “I like it.”
    “You used to write over here. You were busy. You’d bring ink and make your drawings. Now you go home and do all the interesting things there. You just eat and sleep here and then leave first thing in the morning. It’s dull.”
    “I like it.”
    “We haven’t been to a party in months! I like to see people! I’m bored! I’m so bored I’m about to go crazy! I want to do things! I want to DANCE! I want to, live!”
    “Oh, shit.”
    “You’re too old. You just want to sit around and criticize everything and everybody. You don’t want to do anything. Nothing’s good enough for you!”
    I rolled out of bed and stood up. I began putting my shirt on.
    “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “I’m getting out of here.”
    “There you go! The minute things don’t go your way you jump up and run out of the door. You never want to talk about things. You go home and get drunk and then you’re so sick the next day you think you’re going to die. Then you phone me!”
    “I’m getting the hell out of here!”
    “But why?”
    “I don’t want to stay where I’m not wanted. I don’t want to stay where I’m disliked.”
    Lydia waited. Then she said, “All right. Come on, lay down. We’ll turn off the light and just be still together.”
    I waited. Then I said, “Well, all right.”
    I undressed entirely and got under the blanket and sheet. I pressed my flank against Lydia’s flank. We were both on our backs. I could hear the crickets. It was a nice neighborhood. A few minutes passed. Then Lydia said, “I’m going to be great.”
    I didn’t answer. A few more minutes passed. Then Lydia leaped out of bed. She threw both of her hands up in the air toward the ceiling and said in a loud voice: “I’M GOING TO BE GREAT! I’M GOING TO BE TRULY GREAT! NOBODY KNOWS HOW GREAT I’M GOING TO BE!”
    “All right,” I said.
    Then she said in a lower voice, “You don’t understand. I’m going to be great. I have more potential than you have!”
    “Potential,” I said, “doesn’t mean a thing. You’ve got to do it. Almost every baby in a crib has more potential than I have.”
    “But I’m GOING to do it! I’M GOING TO BE TRULY GREAT!”
    “All right,” I said. “But meanwhile come on back to bed.”
    Lydia came back to bed. We didn’t kiss each other. We weren’t going to have sex. I felt weary. I listened to the crickets. I don’t know how much time went by. I was almost asleep, not quite, when Lydia suddenly sat straight up in bed. And she screamed. It was a loud scream.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “Be quiet.”
    I waited. Lydia sat there, without moving, for what seemed to be about ten minutes. Then she fell back on her pillow.
    “I saw God,” she said, “I just saw God.”
    “Listen, you bitch, you are going to drive me crazy!”
    I got up and began dressing. I was mad. I couldn’t find my shorts. The hell with them, I thought. I left them wherever they were. I had all my clothes on and was sitting on the chair pulling my shoes on my bare feet.
    “What are you doing?” Lydia asked.
    I couldn’t answer. I went into the front room. My coat was flung over a chair and I picked it up, put it on. Lydia ran into the front room. She had put on her blue negligee and a pair of panties. She was barefooted. Lydia had thick ankles. She usually wore boots to hide them.
    “YOU’RE NOT GOING!” she screamed at me.
    “Shit,” I said, “I’m getting out of here.”
    She leaped at me. She usually attacked me while I was drunk. Now I was sober. I sidestepped and she fell to the floor, rolled over and was on her back. I stepped over her on my way to the front door. She was in a spitting rage, snarling, her lips pulled back. She was like a leopardess. I looked down at her. I felt safe with her on the floor. She let out a snarl and as I started to leave she reached up and dug her nails into the sleeve of my coat, pulled and ripped the sleeve off my arm. It was ripped from the coat at the shoulder.
    “Jesus Christ,” I said, “look what you’ve done to my new coat! I just bought it!”
    I opened the door and jumped outside with one bare arm.
    I had just unlocked the door to my car when I heard her bare feet on the asphalt behind me. I leaped in and locked the door. I punched the starter.
    “I’ll kill this car!” she screamed. “I’ll kill this car!”
    Her fists beat on the hood, on the roof, against the windshield. I moved the car ahead very slowly so as not to injure her. My ‘62 Mercury Comet had fallen apart, and I’d recently purchased a ‘67 Volks. I kept it shined and waxed. I even had a whisk broom in the glove compartment. As I pulled away Lydia kept beating on the car with her fists. When I was clear of her I shoved it into second. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw her standing all alone in the moonlight, motionless in her blue negligee and panties. My gut began to twitch and roll. I felt ill, useless, sad. I was in love with her.
    12
    I went to my place, started drinking. I snapped on the radio and found some classical music. I got my Coleman lantern out of the closet. I turned out the lights and sat playing with the Coleman lantern. There were tricks you could play with a Coleman lantern. Like turning it off and then on again and watching the heat of the wick relight it. I also liked to pump the lantern and bring up the pressure. And then there was simply the pleasure of looking at it. I drank and watched the lantern and listened to the music and smoked a cigar.
    The phone rang. It was Lydia. “What are you doing?” she asked.
    “Just sitting around.”
    “You’re sitting around and drinking and listening to symphony music and playing with that goddamned Coleman lantern!”
    “Yes.”
    “Are you coming back?”
    “No.”
    “All right, drink! Drink and get sick! You know that stuff almost killed you once. Do you remember the hospital?”
    “I’ll never forget it.”
    “All right, drink, DRINK! KILL YOURSELF! SEE IF I GIVE A SHIT!”
    Lydia hung up and so did I. Something told me she wasn’t as worried about my possible death as she was about her next fuck. But I needed a vacation. I needed a rest. Lydia liked to fuck at least nve times a week. I preferred three. I got up and went into the breakfast nook where my typewriter stood on the table. I turned on the light, sat down and typed Lydia a 4-page letter. Then I went into the bathroom, got a razorblade, came out, sat down and had a good drink. I took the razorblade and sliced the middle finger of my right hand. The blood ran. I signed my name to the letter in blood.
    I went down to the corner mailbox and dropped the letter in.
    The phone rang several times. It was Lydia. She screamed things at me.
    “I’m going out DANCING! I’m not going to sit around alone while you drink!”
    I told her, “You act like drinking is like my going with another woman.”
    “It’s worse!”
    She hung up.
    I kept drinking. I didn’t feel like sleeping. Soon it was midnight, then 1 am, 2 am. The Coleman lantern burned on… .
    At 3:30 am the phone rang. Lydia again. “Are you still drinking?”
    “Sure!”
    “You rotten son of a bitch!”
    “In fact just as you called I was peeling the cellophane off this pint of Cutty Sark. It’s beautiful. You ought to see it!”
    She slammed down the phone. I mixed another drink. There was good music on the radio. I leaned back. I felt very good.
    The door banged open and Lydia ran into the room. She stood there panting. The pint was on the coffee table. She saw it and grabbed it. I jumped up and grabbed her. When I was drunk and Lydia was insane we were nearly an equal match. She held the bottle high in the air, away from me, and tried to get out of the door with it. I grabbed the arm that held the bottle, and tried to get it away from her.
    “YOU WHORE! YOU HAVE NO RIGHT! GIVE ME THAT FUCKING BOTTLE!”
    Then we were out on the porch, wrestling. We tripped on the stairs and fell to the pavement. The bottle smashed and broke on the cement. She got up and ran off. I heard her car start. I lay there and looked at the broken bottle. It was a foot away. Lydia drove off. The moon was still up. In the bottom of what was left of the bottle I could see a swallow of scotch. Stretched out there on the pavement I reached for it and lifted it to my mouth. A long shard of glass almost poked into one of my eyes as I drank what remained. Then I got up and went inside. The thirst in me was terrible. I walked around picking up beer bottles and drinking the bit that remained in each one. Once I got a mouthful of ashes as I often used beer bottles for ashtrays. It was 4:14 am. I sat and watched the clock. It was like working in the post office again. Time was motionless while existence was a throbbing unbearable thing. I waited. I waited. I waited. I waited. Finally it was 6 am. I walked to the corner to the liquor store. A clerk was opening up. He let me in. I purchased another pint of Cutty Sark. I walked back home, locked the door and phoned Lydia.
    “I have here one pint of Cutty Sark from which I am peeling the cellophane. I am going to have a drink. And the liquor store will now be open for 20 hours.”
    She hung up. I had one drink and then walked into the bedroom, stretched out on the bed, and went to sleep without taking off my clothes.
    13
    A week later I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard with Lydia. A weekly entertainment newspaper published in California at that time had asked me to write an article on the life of the writer in Los Angeles. I had written it and was driving over to the editorial offices to submit it. We parked in the lot at Mosley Square. Mosley Square was a section of expensive bungalows used as offices by music publishers, agents, promoters and the like. The rents were very high.
    We went into one of the bungalows. There was a handsome girl behind the desk, educated and cool.
    “I’m Chinaski,” I said, “and here’s my copy.”
    I threw it on the desk.
    “Oh, Mr. Chinaski, I’ve always admired your work very much!”
    “Do you have anything to drink around here?”
    “Just a moment… .”
    She went up to a carpeted stairway and came back down with a bottle of expensive red wine. She opened it and pulled some glasses from a hidden bar. How I’d like to get in bed with her, I thought. But there was no way. Yet, somebody was going to bed with her regularly.
    We sat and sipped our wine.
    “We’ll let you know very soon about the article. I’m sure we’ll take it… . But you’re not at all the way I expected you to be… .”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Your voice is so soft. You seem so nice.”
    Lydia laughed. We finished our wine and left. As we were walking toward my car I heard a voice. “Hank!”
    I looked around and there sitting in a new Mercedes was Dee Dee Bronson. I walked over.
    “How’s it going, Dee Dee?”
    “Pretty good. I quit Capitol Records. Now I’m running that place over there.” She pointed. It was another music company, quite famous, with its home office in London. Dee Dee used to drop by my place with her boyfriend when he and I both had columns in a Los Angeles underground newspaper.
    “Jesus, you’re doing good,” I said.
    “Yes, except …”
    “Except what?”
    “Except I need a man. A good man.”
    “Well, give me your phone number and I’ll see if I can find one for you.”
    “All right.”
    Dee Dee wrote her phone number on a slip of paper and I put it in my wallet. Lydia and I walked over to my old Volks and got in. “You’re going to phone her,” Lydia said. “You’re going to use that number.”
    I started the car and got back on Hollywood Boulevard.
    “You’re going to use that number,” she said. “I just know you’re going to use that number!”
    “Cut the shit!” I said.
    It looked like another bad night.
    14
    We had another fight. Later I was back at my place but I didn’t feel like sitting there alone and drinking. The night harness racing meet was on. I took a pint and went out to the track. I arrived early and got all my figures together. By the time the first race was over the pint was surprisingly more than half gone. I was mixing it with hot coffee and it went down easily.
    I won three of the first four races. Later I won an exacta and was nearly $200 ahead by the end of the 5th race. I went to the bar and played off the toteboard. That night they gave me what I called “a good toteboard.” Lydia would have shit if she could have seen me pulling in all that cash. She hated it when I won at the track, especially when she was losing.
    I kept drinking and hitting. By the time the 9th race was over I was $950 ahead and very drunk. I put my wallet in one of my side pockets and walked slowly to my car.
    I sat in my car and watched the losers leave the parking lot. I sat there until the traffic thinned out then I started the engine. Just outside the track was a supermarket. I saw a lighted phone booth at one end of the parking lot, drove in and got out. I walked to the phone and dialed Lydia’s number.
    “Listen,” I said, “listen, you bitch, I went to the harness races tonight and won $950. I’m a winner! I’ll always be a winner! You don’t deserve me, bitch! You’ve been playing with me! Well, it’s over! I want out! This is it! I don’t need you and your goddamned games! Do you understand me? Do you get the message? Or is your head thicker than your ankles?”
    “Hank …”
    “Yes?”
    “This isn’t Lydia. This is Bonnie. I’m baby sitting for Lydia. She went out tonight.”
    I hung up and walked back to my car.
    15
    Lydia phoned me in the morning. “Whenever you get drunk,” she said, “I’m going out dancing. I went to the Red Umbrella last night and I asked men to dance with me. A woman has a right to do that.”
    “You’re a whore.”
    “Yeah? Well, if there’s anything worse than a whore it’s a bore.”
    “If there’s anything worse than a bore it’s a boring whore.”
    “If you don’t want my pussy,” she said, “I’ll give it to somebody else.”
    “That’s your privilege.”
    “After I finished dancing, I went to see Marvin. I wanted to get his girlfriend’s address and go see her. Francine. You went to see his girl Francine one night yourself,” Lydia said.
    “Look, I never fucked her. I was just too drunk to drive home after a party. We didn’t even kiss. She let me sleep on her couch and I went home in the morning.”
    “Anyhow, after I got to Marvin’s, I decided not to ask for Francine’s address.”
    Marvin’s parents had money. He had a house down by the seashore. Marvin wrote poetry, better poetry than most. I liked Marvin.
    “Well, I hope you had a good time,” I said and hung up.
    I had no sooner hung up when the phone rang again. It was Marvin. “Hey, guess who came by real late last night? Lydia. She knocked on the window and I let her in. She gave me a hard-on.”
    “O.K., Marvin. I understand. I’m not blaming you.”
    “You’re not pissed?”
    “Not at you.”
    “All right then …”
    I took the sculpted head and loaded it into my car. I drove over to Lydia’s and put the head on her doorstep. I didn’t ring the bell. I started to walk away. Lydia came out.
    “Why are you such an ass?” she asked.
    I turned. “You are not selective. One man’s the same as another to you. I’m not going to eat your shit.”
    “I’m not going to eat your shit either!” she screamed and slammed the door.
    I walked to my car, got in and started it. I put it in first. It didn’t move. I tried second. Nothing. Then I went back to first. I checked to be sure the brake was off. It wouldn’t move. I tried reverse. The car moved backwards. I braked and tried first again. The car wouldn’t move. I was still very angry with Lydia. I thought, well, I’ll drive the fucking thing home backwards. Then I thought about the cops stopping me and asking me what the hell
    I was doing. Well, officers, I had a fight with my girl and this was the only way I could get home.
    I didn’t feel so angry with Lydia anymore. I climbed out and went to her door. She had taken my head inside. I knocked.
    Lydia opened the door. “Look,” I asked, “are you some kind of witch?”
    “No, I’m a whore, remember?”
    “You’ve got to drive me home. My car will only run backwards. The goddamned thing is hexed.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Come on, I’ll show you.”
    Lydia followed me out to the car. “The gears have been working fine. Then all of a sudden the car will only run backwards. I was going to drive it home that way.”
    I got in. “Now watch.”
    I started the car and put it in first, let out the clutch. It jumped forward. I put it in second. It went into second and moved faster. I put it into third. It moved nicely forward. I made a U-turn and parked on the other side of the street. Lydia walked over.
    “Listen,” I said, “you’ve got to believe me. A minute ago the car would only run backwards. Now it’s all right. Please believe me.”
    “I believe you,” she said. “God did it. I believe in that sort of thing.”
    “It must mean something.”
    “It does.”
    I got out of the car. We walked into her house.
    “Take off your shirt and shoes,” she said, “and lay down on the bed. First I want to squeeze your blackheads.”
    16
    The ex-Japanese wrestler who was into real estate sold Lydia’s house. She had to move out. There was Lydia, Tonto, Lisa and the dog, Bugbutt. In Los Angeles most landlords hang out the same sign: ADULTS ONLY. With two children and a dog it was very difficult. Only Lydia’s good looks could help her. A male landlord was needed.
    I drove them all around town. It was useless. Then I stayed out of sight in the car. It still didn’t work. As we drove along Lydia screamed out the window, “Isn’t there anybody in this town who will rent to a woman with two kids and a dog?”
    Unexpectedly a vacancy occurred in my court. I saw the people moving out and I went right down and talked to Mrs. O’Keefe.
    “Listen,” I said, “my girlfriend needs a place to live. She has two kids and a dog but they’re all well-behaved. Will you let them move in?”
    “I’ve seen that woman,” said Mrs. O’Keefe. “Haven’t you noticed her eyes? She’s crazy.”
    “I know she’s crazy. But I care for her. She has some good qualities, really.”
    “She’s too young for you! What are you going to do with a young woman like that?”
    I laughed.
    Mr. O’Keefe walked up behind his wife. He looked at me through the screen door. “He’s pussy-whipped, that’s all. It’s quite simple, he’s pussy-whipped.”
    “How about it?” I asked.
    “All right,” said Mrs. O’Keefe. “Move her in… .”
    So Lydia rented a U-Haul and I moved her in. It was mostly clothes, all the heads she had sculpted, and a large washing machine.
    “I don’t like Mrs. O’Keefe,” she told me. “Her husband looks all right, but I don’t like her.”
    “She’s a good Catholic sort. And you need a place to live.”
    “I don’t want you drinking with those people. They’re out to destroy you.”
    “I’m only paying 85 bucks a month rent. They treat me like a son. I have to have a beer with them now and then.”
    “Son, shit! You’re almost as old as they are.”
    About three weeks passed. It was late one Saturday morning. I had not slept at Lydia’s the night before. I bathed and had a beer, got dressed. I disliked weekends. Everybody was out on the streets. Everybody was playing PingPong or mowing their lawn or polishing their car or going to the supermarket or the beach or to the park. Crowds everywhere. Monday was my favorite day. Everybody was back on the job and out of sight. I decided to go to the racetrack despite the crowd. That would help kill Saturday. I ate a hard-boiled egg, had another beer and stepping out on my porch, locked the door. Lydia was outside playing with Bugbutt, the dog.
    “Hi,” she said.
    “Hi,” I said. “I’m going to the track.”
    Lydia walked over to me. “Listen, you know what the racetrack does to you.”
    She meant that I was always too tired to make love after going to the racetrack.
    “You were drunk last night,” she continued. “You were horrible. You frightened Lisa. I had to run you out.”
    “I’m going to the racetrack.”
    “All right, you go ahead and go to the racetrack. But if you do I won’t be here when you get back.”
    I got into my car which was parked on the front lawn. I rolled down the windows and started the motor. Lydia was standing in the driveway. I waved goodbye to her and pulled out into the street. It was a nice summer day. I drove down to Hollywood Park. I had a new system. Each new system brought me closer and closer to wealth. It was simply a matter of time.
    I lost $40 and drove home. I parked my car on the lawn and got out. As I walked around the porch to my door Mr. O’Keefe walked up the driveway. “She’s gone!”
    “What?”
    “Your girl. She moved out.”
    I didn’t answer.
    “She rented a U-Haul and loaded her stuff in it. She was mad. You know that big washing machine?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, that thing’s heavy. I couldn’t lift it. She wouldn’t let the boy help her. She just lifted the thing and put it in the U-Haul. Then she got the kids, the dog, and drove off. She had a week’s rent left.”
    “All right, Mr. O’Keefe. Thanks.”
    “You coming down to drink tonight?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Try to make it.”
    I unlocked the door and went inside. I had lent her an air-conditioner. It was sitting in a chair outside of the closet. There was a note on it and a pair of blue panties. The note was in a wild scrawl:
    “Bastard, here is your air-conditioner. I am gone. I am gone for good, you son-of-a-bitch! When you get lonely you can use these panties to jack-off into. Lydia.”
    I went to the refrigerator and got a beer. I drank the beer and then walked over to the air-conditioner. I picked up the panties and stood there wondering if it would work. Then I said, “Shit!” and threw them on the floor.
    I went to the phone and dialed Dee Dee Bronson. She was in. “Hello?” she said.
    “Dee Dee,” I said, “this is Hank… .”
    I7
    Dee Dee had a place in the Hollywood Hills. Dee Dee shared the place with a friend, another lady executive, Bianca. Bianca took the top floor and Dee Dee the bottom. I rang the bell. It was 8:30 pm when Dee Dee opened the door. Dee Dee was about 40, had black, cropped hair, was Jewish, hip, freaky. She was New York City oriented, knew all the names: the right publishers, the best poets, the most talented cartoonists, the right revolutionaries, anybody, everybody. She smoked grass continually and acted like it was the early 1960’s and Love-In Time, when she had been mildly famous and much more beautiful.
    A long series of bad love affairs had finally done her in. Now I was standing at her door. There was a good deal left of her body. She was small but buxom and many a young girl would have loved to have her figure.
    I followed her in. “So Lydia split?” Dee Dee asked.
    “I think she went to Utah. The 4th of July dance in Muleshead is coming up. She never misses it.”
    I sat down in the breakfast nook while Dee Dee uncorked a red wine. “Do you miss her?”
    “Christ, yes. I feel like crying. My whole gut is chewed up. I might not make it.”
    “You’ll make it. We’ll get you over Lydia. We’ll pull you through.”
    “Then you know how I feel?”
    “It has happened to most of us a few times.”
    “That bitch never cared to begin with.”
    “Yes, she did. She still does.”
    I decided it was better to be there in Dee Dee’s large home in the Hollywood Hills than to be sitting all alone back in my apartment and brooding.
    “It must be that I’m just not good with the ladies,” I said.
    “You’re good enough with the ladies,” Dee Dee said. “And you’re a helluva writer.”
    “I’d rather be good with the ladies.”
    Dee Dee was lighting a cigarette. I waited until she was finished, then I leaned across the table and gave her a kiss. “You make me feel good. Lydia was always on the attack.”
    “That doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
    “But it can get to be unpleasant.”
    “It sure as hell can.”
    “Have you found a boyfriend yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    “I like this place. But how do you keep it so neat and clean?”
    “We have a maid.”
    “Oh?”
    “You’ll like her. She’s big and black and she finishes her work as fast as she can after I leave. Then she goes to bed and eats cookies and watches t.v. I find cookie crumbs in my bed every night. I’ll have her fix you breakfast after I leave tomorrow morning.”
    “All right.”
    “No, wait. Tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t work Sundays. We’ll eat out. I know a place. You’ll like it.”
    “All right.”
    “You know, I think I’ve always been in love with you.”
    “What?”
    “For years. You know, when I used to come and see you, first with Bernie and later with Jack, I would want you. But you never noticed me. You were always sucking on a can of beer or you were obsessed with something.”
    “Crazy, I guess, near crazy. Postal Service madness. I’m sorry I didn’t notice you.”
    “You can notice me now.”
    Dee Dee poured another glass of wine. It was good wine. I liked her. It was good to have a place to go when things went bad. I remembered the early days when things would go bad and there wasn’t anywhere to go. Maybe that had been good for me. Then. But now I wasn’t interested in what was good for me. I was interested in how I felt and how to stop feeling bad when things went wrong. How to start feeling good again.
    “I don’t want to fuck you over, Dee Dee,” I said. “I’m not always good to women.”
    “I told you I love you.”
    “Don’t do it. Don’t love me.”
    “All right,” she said, “I won’t love you, I’ll almost love you. Will that be all right?”
    “It’s much better than the other.”
    We finished our wine and went to bed… .
    18
    In the morning Dee Dee drove me to the Sunset Strip for breakfast. The Mercedes was black and shone in the sun. We drove past the billboards and the nightclubs and the fancy restaurants. I slouched low in my seat, coughing over my cigarette. I thought, well, things have been worse. A scene or two flashed through my head. One winter in Atlanta I was freezing, it was midnight, I had no money, no place to sleep, and I walked up the steps of a church hoping to get inside and get warm. The church door was locked. Another time in El Paso, sleeping on a park bench, I was awakened in the morning by some cop smacking the soles of my shoes with his club. Still, I kept thinking about Lydia. The good parts of our relationship felt like a rat walking around and gnawing at the inside of my stomach.
    Dee Dee parked outside a fancy eating place. There was a sun patio with chairs and tables where people sat eating, talking, and drinking coffee. We passed a black man in boots, jeans, and with a heavy silver chain coiled around his neck. His motorcycle helmet, goggles and gloves were on the table. He was with a thin blond girl in a peppermint jumpsuit who sat sucking on her little ringer. The place was crowded. Everybody looked young, scrubbed, bland. Nobody stared at us. Everybody was talking quietly.
    We went inside and a pale slim boy with tiny buttocks, tight silver pants, an 8-inch studded belt and shiny gold blouse seated us. His ears were pierced and he wore tiny blue earrings. His pencil-thin mustache looked purple.
    “Dee Dee,” he said, “what is happening?”
    “Breakfast, Donny.”
    “A drink, Donny,” I said.
    “I know what he needs, Donny. Give him a Golden Flower, double.”
    We ordered breakfast and Dee Dee said, “It will take a while to prepare. They cook everything to order here.”
    “Don’t spend too much, Dee Dee.”
    “It all goes on the expense account.”
    She took out a little black book. “Now, let’s see. Who am I taking to breakfast? Elton John?”
    “Isn’t he in Africa …”
    “Oh, that’s right. Well, how about Cat Stevens?”
    “Who’s that?”
    “You don’t know?”
    “No.”
    “Well, I discovered him. You can be Cat Stevens.”
    Donny brought the drink and he and Dee Dee talked. They seemed to know the same people. I didn’t know any of them. It took a lot to excite me. I didn’t care. I didn’t like New York. I didn’t like Hollywood. I didn’t like rock music. I didn’t like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it—I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic. And Lydia was gone.
    I finished my drink and Dee Dee ordered another. I began to feel like a kept man and it felt great. It helped my blues. There is nothing worse than being broke and having your woman leave you. Nothing to drink, no job, just the walls, sitting there staring at the walls and thinking. That’s how women got back at you, but it hurt and weakened them too. Or so I like to believe.
    The breakfast was good. Eggs garnished with various fruits … pineapple, peaches, pears … some grated nuts, seasoning. It was a good breakfast. We finished and Dee Dee ordered me another drink. The thought of Lydia still remained inside of me, but Dee Dee was nice. Her conversation was decisive and entertaining. She was able to make me laugh, which I needed. My laughter was all there inside of me waiting to roar out: HAHAHAHAHA, o my god o my HAHAHAHA. It felt so good when it happened. Dee Dee knew something about life. Dee Dee knew that what happened to one happened to most of us. Our lives were not so different—even though we liked to think so.
    Pain is strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire… . Pain arrives, BANG, and there it is, it sits on you. It’s real. And to anybody watching, you look foolish. Like you’ve suddenly become an idiot. There’s no cure for it unless you know somebody who understands how you feel, and knows how to help.
    We went back to the car. “I know just where to take you to cheer you up,” said Dee Dee. I didn’t answer. I was being catered to as if I was an invalid. Which I was.
    I asked Dee Dee to stop at a bar. One of hers. The bartender knew her.
    “This,” she told me as we entered, “is where a lot of the script writers hang out. And some of the little-theatre people.”
    I disliked them all immediately, sitting around acting clever and superior. They nullified each other. The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
    “Let’s get a table,” I said. So there I was, a $65 a week writer sitting in a room with other writers, $1000 a week writers. Lydia, I thought, I am getting there. You’ll be sorry. Some day I’ll go into fancy restaurants and I’ll be recognized. They’ll have a special table for me in the back near the kitchen.
    We got our drinks and Dee Dee looked at me. “You give good head. You give the best head I ever had.”
    “Lydia taught me. Then I added a few touches of my own.”
    A dark young boy jumped up and came over to our table. Dee Dee introduced us. The boy was from New York, wrote for the Village Voice and other New York newspapers. He and Dee Dee name-dropped a while and then he asked her, “What’s your husband do?”
    “I got a stable,” I said. “Fighters. Four good Mexican boys. Plus one black boy, a real dancer. What do you weigh?”
    “158. Were you a fighter? Your face looks like you caught a few.”
    “I’ve caught a few. We can put you in at 135. I need a southpaw lightweight.”
    “How’d you know I was a southpaw?”
    “You’re holding your cigarette in your left hand. Come on down to the Main Street gym. Monday am. We’ll start your training. Cigarettes are out. Put that son of a bitch out!”
    “Listen, man, I’m a writer. I use a typewriter. You never read my stuff?”
    “All I read is the metropolitan dailies—murders, rapes, fight results, swindles, jetliner crashes and Ann Landers.”
    “Dee Dee,” he said, “I’ve got an interview with Rod Stewart in 30 minutes. I gotta go.” He left.
    Dee Dee ordered another round of drinks. “Why can’t you be decent to people?” she asked.
    “Fear,” I said.
    “Here we are,” she said and drove her car into the Hollywood cemetery.
    “Nice,” I said, “real nice. I had forgotten all about death.”
    We drove around. Most of the tombs were above ground. They were like little houses, with pillars and front steps. And each had a locked iron door. Dee Dee parked and we got out. She tried one of the doors. I watched her behind wiggle as she worked at the door. I thought about Nietzsche. There we were: a German stallion and a Jewish mare. The Fatherland would adore me.
    We got back into the M. Benz and Dee Dee parked outside of one of the bigger units. They were all stuck into the walls in there. Rows and rows of them. Some had flowers, in little vases, but most of the blooms were withered. The majority of the niches didn’t have flowers. Some of them had husband and wife neatly side by side. In some cases one niche was empty and waiting. In all cases the husband was the one already dead.
    Dee Dee took my hand and led me around the corner. There he was, down near the bottom, Rudolph Valentino. Dead 1926. Didn’t live long. I decided to live to be 80. Think of being 80 and fucking an 18 year old girl. If there was any way to cheat the game of death, that was it.
    Dee Dee lifted one of the flower vases and dropped it into her purse. The standard trip. Rip off whatever wasn’t tied down. Everything belonged to everybody. We went outside and Dee Dee said, “I want to sit on Tyrone Power’s bench. He was my favorite. I loved him!”
    We went and sat on Tyrone’s bench next to his grave. Then we got up and walked over to Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s tomb. He had a good one. His own private reflector pool in front of the tomb. The pool was filled with water lillies and pollywogs. We walked up some stairs and there at the back of the tomb was a place to sit. Dee Dee and I sat. I noticed a crack in the wall of the tomb with small red ants running in and out. I watched the small red ants for a while, then put my arms around Dee Dee and kissed her, a good long long kiss. We were going to be good friends.
    19
    Dee Dee had to pick up her son at the airport. He was coming home from England for his vacation. He was 17, she told me, and his father was an ex-concert pianist. But he’d fallen for speed and coke, and later on burned his fingers in an accident. He could no longer play the piano. They’d been divorced for some time.
    The son’s name was Renny. Dee Dee had told him about me during several trans-Atlantic telephone conversations. We got to the airport as Renny’s flight was disembarking. Dee Dee and Renny embraced. He was tall and thin, quite pale. A lock of hair hung over one eye. We shook hands.
    I went to get the baggage while Renny and Dee Dee chatted. He addressed her as “Mommy.” When we got back to the car he climbed into the back seat and said, “Mommy, did you get my bike?”
    “I’ve ordered it. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
    “Is it a good bike, Mommy? I want a ten-speed with a hand brake and pedal grips.”
    “It’s a good bike, Kenny.”
    “Are you sure it will be ready?”
    We drove back. I stayed overnight. Renny had his own bedroom.
    In the morning we all sat in the breakfast nook together waiting for the maid to arrive. Dee Dee finally got up to fix breakfast for us. Renny said, “Mommy, how do you break an egg?”
    Dee Dee looked at me. She knew what I was thinking. I remained silent.
    “All right, Renny, come here and I’ll show you.”
    Renny walked over to the stove. Dee Dee picked up an egg. “You see, you just break the shell against the side of the pan … like this … and let the egg fall out of the shell into the pan … like this… .”
    “Oh …”
    “It’s simple.”
    “And how do you cook it?”
    “We fry it. In butter.”
    “Mommy, I can’t eat that egg.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the yoke is broken!”
    Dee Dee turned around and looked at me. Her eyes said, “Hank, don’t say a goddamned word… .”
    A few mornings later found us all in the breakfast nook again. We were eating while the maid worked in the kitchen. Dee Dee said to Renny, “You’ve got your bike now. I want you to pick up a 6-pack sometime today. When I get home I want a Coke or two to drink.”
    “But, Mommy, those Cokes are heavy! Can’t you get them?”
    “Renny, I work all day and I’m tired. You get the Cokes.”
    “But, Mommy, there’s a hill. I’ll have to pedal over the hill.”
    “There’s no hill. What hill?”
    “Well, you can’t see it with your eyes, but it’s there… .”
    “Renny, you get those Cokes, understand?”
    Renny got up, walked to his bedroom and slammed the door. Dee Dee looked away. “He’s testing me. He wants to see if I love him.”
    “I’ll get the Cokes,” I said.
    “That’s all right,” said Dee Dee, “I’ll get them.”
    Finally, none of us got them… .
    Dee Dee and I were at my place a few days later picking up the mail and looking around when the phone rang. It was Lydia. “Hi,” she said, “I’m in Utah.”
    “I got your note,” I said.
    “How are you doing?” she asked.
    “Everything’s all right.”
    “Utah’s nice in the summer. You ought to come up here. We’ll go camping. All my sisters are here.”
    “I can’t get away right now.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, I’m with Dee Dee.”
    “Dee Dee?”
    “Well, yes …”
    “I knew you’d use that phone number,” she said. “I told you you’d use that number!”
    Dee Dee was standing next to me. “Please tell her,” she said, “to give me until September.”
    “Forget her,” Lydia said. “To hell with her. You come up here and see me.”
    “I can’t drop everything just because you phone. Besides,” I said, “I’m giving Dee Dee until September.”
    “September?”
    “Yes.”
    Lydia screamed. It was a long loud scream. Then she hung up.
    After that Dee Dee kept me away from my place. Once, while we were at my place going over the mail, I noticed the phone off the hook. “Never do that again,” I told her.
    Dee Dee took me for long rides up and down the coast. She took me on trips to the mountains. We went to garage sales, to movies, to rock concerts, to churches, to friends, to dinners and lunches, to magic shows, picnics and circuses. Her friends photographed us together.
    The trip to Catalina was horrible. I waited with Dee Dee on the dock. I was really hungover. Dee Dee got me an Alka-Seltzer and a glass of water. The only thing that helped was a young girl sitting across from us. She had a beautiful body, long good legs, and she wore a mini-skirt. With the mini-skirt she wore long stockings, a garter belt, and she had on pink panties under the red skirt. She even wore high heeled shoes.
    “You’re looking at her, aren’t you?” asked Dee Dee.
    “I can’t stop.”
    “She’s a slut.”
    “Sure.”
    The slut got up and played pinball, wiggling her behind to help the balls fall in. Then she sat back down, showing more than ever.
    The seaplane came in, unloaded, and then we stood out on the dock and waited to board. The seaplane was red, of 1936 vintage, had two propellers, one pilot and 8 or 10 seats.
    If I don’t puke in that thing, I thought, I will have fooled the world.
    The girl in the mini-skirt wasn’t getting on.
    Why was it that every time you saw a woman like that you were always with another woman?
    We got on, strapped ourselves in.
    “Oh,” said Dee Dee, “I’m so excited! I’m going up and sit with the pilot!”
    “O.K.”
    So we took off and Dee Dee was up there sitting with the pilot. I could see her talking away. She did enjoy life or she appeared to. Lately it didn’t mean much to me—I mean her excited and happy reaction to life—it irritated me somewhat, but mostly it left me without feeling. It didn’t even bore me.
    We flew and we landed, the landing was rough, we swung low along some cliffs and bounced and the spray went up. It was something like being in a speed boat. Then we taxied to another dock and Dee Dee came back and told me all about the seaplane and the pilot, and the conversation. There was a big piece cut out of the floor up there, and she’d asked the pilot, “Is this thing safe?” and he had answered, “Damned if I know.”
    Dee Dee had gotten us a hotel room right on the shore, on the top floor. There was no refrigeration so she got a plastic tub and packed ice in it for my beer. There was a black and white t. v. and a bathroom. Class.
    We went for a walk along the shore. The tourists were of two types—either very young or very old. The old walked about in pairs, man and woman, in their sandals and dark shades and straw hats and walking shorts and wildly-colored shirts. They were fat and pale with blue veins in their legs and their faces were puffed and white in the sun. They sagged everywhere, folds and pouches of skin hung from their cheekbones and under their jowls.
    The young were slim, and seemed made of smooth rubber. The girls had no breasts and tiny behinds and the boys had tender soft faces and grinned and blushed and laughed. But they all seemed contented, young high school people and old people. There was very little for them to do, but they lounged in the sun and seemed fulfilled.
    Dee Dee went into the shops. She was delighted with the shops, buying beads, ashtrays, toy dogs, postcards, necklaces, figurines, and seemed happy with everything. “Oooh, look!” She talked to the shop owners. She seemed to like them. She promised one lady that she would write when she got back to the mainland. They had a mutual friend—a man who played percussion in a rock band.
    Dee Dee bought a cage with two love birds and we went back to the hotel. I opened a beer and turned on the t.v. The selection was limited.
    “Let’s go for another walk,” said Dee Dee. “It’s so lovely outside.”
    “I’m going to sit here and rest,” I said.
    “You don’t mind if I go without you?”
    “It’s all right.”
    She kissed me and left. I turned off the t.v. and opened another beer. Nothing to do on this island but get drunk. I walked to the window. On the beach below Dee Dee was sitting next to a young man, talking happily, smiling and gesturing with her hands. The young man grinned back. It felt good not to be part of that sort of thing. I was glad I wasn’t in love, that I wasn’t happy with the world. I like being at odds with everything. People in love often become edgy, dangerous. They lose their sense of perspective.
    They lose their sense of humor. They become nervous, psychotic bores. They even become killers.
    Dee Dee was gone 2 or 3 hours. I looked at some t. v. and typed 2 or 3 poems on a portable typer. Love poems—about Lydia. I hid them in my suitcase. I drank some more beer.
    Then Dee Dee knocked and entered. “Oh, I had the most wonderful time! First I went on the glass-bottom boat. We could see all the different fish in the sea, everything! Then I found another boat that takes people out to where their boats are moored. This young man let me ride for hours for a dollar! His back was sunburned and I rubbed it with lotion. He was terribly burned. We took people out to their boats. And you should have seen the people on those boats! Mostly old men, craggy old men, with young girls. The young girls all wore boots and were drunk and on dope, strung-out, moaning. Some of the old guys had young boys, but most of them had young girls, sometimes two or three or four young girls. Every boat stank of dope and booze and lechery. It was wonderful!”
    “That does sound good. I wish I had your knack of turning up interesting people.”
    “You can go tomorrow. You can ride all day for a dollar.”
    “I’ll pass.”
    “Did you write today?”
    “A little.”
    “Was it good?”
    “You never know until 18 days later.”
    Dee Dee went over and looked at the love birds, talked to them. She was a good woman. I liked her. She was really concerned about me, she wanted me to do well, she wanted me to write well, she wanted me to fuck well, look well. I could feel it. It was fine. Maybe we could fly to Hawaii together some day. I walked up behind her and kissed her on the right ear, down by the lobe.
    “Oh, Hank,” she said.
    Back in L.A., after our week in Catalina, we were sitting around my place one evening, which was unusual. It was late at night. We were lying on my bed, naked, when the phone rang in the next room.
    It was Lydia.
    “Hank?”
    “Yes?”
    “Where’ve you been?”
    “Catalina.”
    “With her?”
    “Yes.”
    “Listen, after you told me about her I got mad. I had an affair. It was with a homosexual. It was awful.”
    “I’ve missed you, Lydia.”
    “I want to come back to L.A.”
    “That’d be good.”
    “If I come back will you give her up?”
    “She’s a good woman, but if you come back I’ll give her up.”
    “I’m coming back. I love you, old man.”
    “I love you too.”
    We went on talking. I don’t know how long we talked. When it was over I walked back into the bedroom. Dee Dee seemed asleep. “Dee Dee?” I asked. I lifted one of her arms. It felt very limp. The flesh felt like rubber. “Stop joking, Dee Dee, I know you’re not asleep.” She didn’t move. I looked around and noticed her bottle of sleeping pills was empty. It had been full. I had tried those pills. Just one of them put you to sleep, only it was more like being knocked out and buried underground.
    “You took the pills… .”
    “I … don’t … care … you’re going back to her … I don’t … care… .”
    I ran into the kitchen and got the dishpan, came back and placed it on the floor by the bed. Then I pulled Dee Dee’s head and shoulders over the edge and stuck my fingers down her throat. She vomited. I lifted her up and let her breathe a moment, then repeated the process. I did it again and again. Dee Dee kept vomiting. Once, as I lifted her up, her teeth popped out. They lay there on the sheet, uppers and lowers.
    “Oooh … my teeth,” she said. Or tried to say.
    “Don’t worry about your teeth.”
    I stuck my fingers down her throat again. Then I pulled her back.
    “I don’,” she said, “wans ya to seee my teethhhs… .”
    “They’re all right, Dee Dee. They’re really not bad.”
    “Ooooh …”
    She revived long enough to put her teeth back in. “Take me home,” she said, “I want to go home.”
    “I’ll stay with you. I won’t leave you alone tonight.” “But you will leave me, finally?” “Let’s get dressed,” I said.
    Valentino would have kept both Lydia and Dee Dee. That’s why he died so young.
    20
    Lydia returned and found a nice apartment in the Burbank area. She seemed to care a lot more for me than before we parted. “My husband had this big cock and that’s all he had. He had no personality, no vibes. Just a big cock and he thought that was all he had to have. But Christ he was dull! With you, I keep getting vibes … this electric feedback, it never stops.” We were on the bed together.
    “And I didn’t even know he had a big cock because his cock was the first one I had ever seen.” She was examining me closely. “I thought they were all like that.”
    “Lydia …”
    “What is it?”
    “I’ve got to tell you something.”
    “What is it?”
    “I’ve got to go see Dee Dee.”
    “Go see Dee Dee?”
    “Don’t be funny. There’s a reason.”
    “You said it was all over.”
    “It is. I just don’t want to let her down too hard. I want to explain to her what happened. People are too cold with each other. I don’t want her back, I just want to try to explain what happened, so she’ll understand.”
    “You want to fuck her.”
    “No, I don’t want to fuck her. I hardly wanted to fuck her when I was with her. I just want to explain.”
    “I don’t like it. It sounds … icky … to me.”
    “Let me do it. Please. I just want to clear things up. I’ll be back soon.”
    “All right. But make it soon.”
    I got into the Volks, cut over to Fountain, went a few miles, then took a north at Bronson and cut up to where the rents were high. I parked outside, got out. I walked up the long flight of stairs and rang the bell. Bianca answered the door. I remembered one night she had answered the door naked and I had grabbed her and as we were kissing Dee Dee came down and said, “What the hell’s going on here?”
    This time it wasn’t like that. Bianca said, “What do you want?”
    “I want to see Dee Dee. I want to talk to her.”
    “She’s sick. Really sick. I don’t think you should get to see her after the way you’ve treated her. You’re a real grade-A son of a bitch.”
    “I just want to talk to her a while, to explain things.”
    “All right. She’s in her bedroom.”
    I walked down the hall and into the bedroom. Dee Dee was on the bed in just her panties. One arm was flung over her eyes. Her breasts looked good. There was an empty pint of whiskey by her bed and a pan on the floor. The pan smelled of vomit and booze.
    “Dee Dee …”
    She lifted her arm. “What? Hank, you’ve come back?”
    “No, wait, I just want to talk to you… .”
    “Oh Hank, I’ve missed you something awful. I’ve been nearly crazy, the pain has been awful. …”
    “I want to make it easier. That’s why I came by. I may be stupid, but I don’t believe in outright cruelty… .”
    “You don’t know how I’ve felt. …”
    “I know. I’ve been there.”
    “Want a drink?” she pointed.
    I picked up the empty pint and sadly put it down again. “There’s too much coldness in the world,” I told her. “If people would only talk things out together it would help.”
    “Stay with me, Hank. Don’t go back to her, please. Please. I’ve lived long enough to know how to be a good woman. You know that. I’d be good to you and for you.”
    “Lydia has a grip on me. I can’t explain it.”
    “She’s a flirt. She’s impulsive. She’ll leave you.”
    “Maybe that’s some of the attraction.”
    “You want a whore. You’re afraid of love.”
    “You might be right.”
    “Just kiss me. Would it be too much to ask you to kiss me?”
    “No.”
    I stretched out next to her. We embraced. Dee Dee’s mouth smelled of vomit. She kissed, we kissed and she held me. I broke away as gently as I could.
    “Hank,” she said, “Stay with me! Don’t go back to her! Look, I have nice legs!”
    Dee Dee lifted one of her legs and showed it to me.
    “And I have nice ankles too! Look!”
    She showed me her ankles.
    I was sitting on the edge of the bed. “I can’t stay with you, Dee Dee—”
    She sat up and began punching me. Her fists were as hard as rocks. She threw punches with both hands. I sat there as she landed blows. She hit me above the eye, in the eye, on the forehead and cheeks. I even caught one in the throat. “Oh, you bastard! Bastard, bastard, bastard! I HATE YOU!”
    I grabbed her wrists. “All right, Dee Dee, that’s enough.” She fell back on the bed as I got up and walked out, down the hall and out the door.
    When I got back Lydia was sitting in an armchair. Her face looked dark. “You’ve been gone a long time. Look at me! You fucked her, didn’t you?”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “You were gone an awful long time. Look, she scratched your face!”
    “I tell you, nothing happened.”
    “Take off your shirt. I want to look at your back!”
    “Oh, shit, Lydia.”
    “Take off your shirt and undershirt.”
    I took them off. She walked around behind me.
    “What’s that scratch on your back?”
    “What scratch?”
    “There’s a long one there … from a woman’s fingernail.”
    “If it’s there you put it there… .”
    “All right. I know one way to find out.”
    “How?”
    “Let’s go to bed.”
    “All right!”
    I passed the test, but afterwards I thought, how can a man test a woman’s fidelity? It seemed unfair.
    21
    I kept getting letters from a lady who lived only a mile or so away. She signed them Nicole. She said she had read some of my books and liked them. I answered one of her letters and she responded with an invitation to visit. One afternoon, without saying anything to Lydia, I got into the Volks and drove on over. She had a flat over a dry cleaner’s on Santa Monica Boulevard. Her door was on the street and I could see a stairway through the glass. I rang the bell. “Who is it?” came a woman’s voice through a little tin speaker. “I’m Chinaski,” I said. A buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open.
    Nicole stood at the top of the stairs looking down at me. She had a cultured, almost tragic face and wore a long green housedress cut low in front. Her body seemed to be very good. She looked at me with large dark brown eyes. There were lots of tiny wrinkles around her eyes, perhaps from too much drinking or crying.
    “Are you alone?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she smiled, “come on up.”
    I went up. It was spacious, two bedrooms, with very little furniture. I noticed a small bookcase and a rack of classical records. I sat on the couch. She sat next to me. “I just finished,” she said, “reading The Life of Picasso.”
    There were several copies of The New Yorker on the coffee table.
    “Can I fix you some tea?” Nicole asked.
    “I’ll go out and get something to drink.”
    “That’s not necessary. I have something.”
    “What?”
    “Some good red wine?”
    “I’d like some,” I said.
    Nicole got up and walked into the kitchen. I watched her move. I had always liked women in long dresses. She moved gracefully. She seemed to have a lot of class. She returned with two glasses and the bottle of wine and poured. She offered me a Benson and Hedges. I lit one.
    “Do you read The New Yorker?” she asked. “They print some good stories.”
    “I don’t agree.”
    “What’s wrong with them?
    “They’re too educated.”
    “I like them.”
    “Well, shit,” I said.
    We sat drinking and smoking.
    “Do you like my apartment?”
    “Yes, it’s nice.”
    “It reminds me of some of the places I’ve had in Europe. I like the space, the light.”
    “Europe, huh?”
    “Yes, Greece, Italy … Greece, mostly.”
    “Paris?”
    “Oh yes, I liked Paris. London, no.”
    Then she told me about herself. Her family had lived in New York City. Her father was a communist, her mother a seamstress in a sweatshop. Her mother had worked the front machine, she was number one, the best of all of them. Tough and likeable. Nicole was self-educated, had grown up in New York, had somehow met a famous doctor, married, lived with him for ten years, then divorced him. She now received only $400 a month alimony, and it was difficult to manage. She couldn’t afford her apartment, but she liked it too much to leave.
    “Your writing,” she said to me, “it’s so raw. It’s like a sledge hammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness… .”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    I put my drink down and looked at her. I cupped her chin in my hand and drew her towards me. I gave her the tiniest kiss.
    Nicole continued talking. She told me quite a few interesting stories, some of which I decided to use myself, either as stories or poems. I watched her breasts as she bent forward and poured drinks. It’s like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking. Nicole opened a new bottle. She talked on. It was easy to listen to her. There was wisdom and some laughter in each of her rales. Nicole was impressing me more than she knew. That worried me, somewhat.
    We walked out on the veranda with our drinks and watched the afternoon traffic. She was talking about Huxley and Lawrence in Italy. What shit. I told her that Knut Hamsun had been the world’s greatest writer. She looked at me, astonished that I’d heard of him, then agreed. We kissed on the veranda, and I could smell the exhaust from the cars in the street below. Her body felt good against mine. I knew we weren’t going to fuck right away, but I also knew that I would be coming back. Nicole knew it too.
    22
    Lydia’s sister Angela came to town from Utah to see Lydia’s new house. Lydia had made a down payment on a little place and the monthly payments were very low. It was a very good buy. The man who sold the house believed he was going to die and he had sold it much too cheap. There was an upstairs bedroom for the children, and an extremely large backyard filled with trees and clumps of bamboo.
    Angela was the oldest of the sisters, the most sensible, with the best body, and was the most realistic. She sold real estate. But there was the problem of where to put Angela. We didn’t have room. Lydia suggested Marvin.
    “Marvin?” I asked.
    “Yes, Marvin,” said Lydia.
    “All right, let’s go,” I said.
    We all climbed into Lydia’s orange Thing. The Thing. That’s what we called her car. It looked like a tank, very old and ugly. It was late evening. We had already phoned Marvin. He had said he’d be home all evening.
    We drove down to the beach and there was his little house by the shore. “Oh,” said Angela, “what a nice house.”
    “He’s rich, too,” said Lydia.
    “And he writes good poetry,” I said.
    We got out. Marvin was in there with his saltwater fish tanks and his paintings. He painted pretty well. For a rich kid he had survived nicely, he had come through. I made the introductions. Angela walked around looking at Marvin’s paintings. “Oh, very nice.” Angela painted too, but she wasn’t very good.
    I had brought some beer and had a pint of whiskey hidden in my coat pocket which I nipped on from time to time. Marvin brought out some more beer and a mild flirtation began between Marvin and Angela. Marvin seemed eager enough but Angela seemed inclined to laugh at him. She liked him, but not well enough to fuck him right away. We drank and talked. Marvin had bongo drums and a piano and some grass. He had a good, comfortable house. In a house like this I could write better, I thought, my luck would be better. You could hear the ocean and there were no neighbors to complain about the noise of a typewriter.
    I continued to nip at the whiskey. We stayed 2 or 3 hours, then left. Lydia took the freeway back.
    “Lydia,” I said, “you fucked Marvin, didn’t you?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “The time you went over there late at night, alone.”
    “Goddamn you, I don’t want to hear that!”
    “Well, it’s true, you fucked him!”
    “Listen, if you keep it up I’m not going to stand for it!”
    “You fucked him.”
    Angela looked frightened. Lydia drove over to the shoulder of the freeway, stopped the car and pushed the door open on my side. “Get out!” she said.
    I got out. The car drove off. I walked along the shoulder of the freeway. I took the pint out and had a nip. I walked along about 5 minutes when the Thing pulled up alongside me. Lydia opened the door. “Get in.” I got in.
    “Don’t say a word.”
    “You fucked him. I know you did.”
    “Oh Christ!”
    Lydia drove back on to the shoulder of the freeway and pushed the door open again. “Get out!”
    I got out. I walked along the shoulder. Then I came to an offramp that led to a deserted street. I walked down the offramp and along the street. It was very dark. I looked into the windows of some of the houses. Apparently I was in a black district. I saw some lights ahead at an intersection. There was a hot dog stand. I walked up to it. A black man was behind the counter. There was nobody else around. I ordered coffee. “Goddamned women,” I said to him. “They are beyond all reason. My girl let me off on the freeway. Want a drink?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    He took a good hit and handed it back.
    “You got a phone?” I asked. “I’ll pay you.”
    “Is it a local call?”
    “Yes.”
    “No charge.”
    He pulled a phone from underneath the counter and handed it to me. I took a drink and handed him the bottle. He took one.
    I called the Yellow Cab Co., gave them the location. My friend had a kind and intelligent face. Goodness could be found sometimes in the middle of hell. We passed the bottle back and forth as I waited for the cab. When the cab arrived I got into the back and gave the cabby Nicole’s address.
    23
    I blacked out after that. I guess I had consumed more whiskey than I thought. I don’t remember arriving at Nicole’s. I awakened in the morning with my back to somebody in a strange bed. I looked at the wall facing me and there was a large decorative letter hanging there. It said “N.” The”N” was for “Nicole.” I felt sick. I went to the bathroom. I used Nicole’s toothbrush, gagged. I washed my face, combed my hair, crapped and pissed, washed my hands and drank a great deal of water from the bathroom faucet. Then I went back to bed. Nicole got up, did her toilet, came back. She faced me. We began to kiss and fondle one another.
    I am innocent in my fashion, Lydia, I thought. I am faithful to thee in my fashion.
    No oral sex. My stomach was too upset. I mounted the famous doctor’s ex-wife. The cultured world traveler. She had the Bronte sisters in her bookcase. We both liked Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I gave her 3 or 4 particularly mean rips and she gasped. Now she knew a writer firsthand. Not a very well-known writer, of course, but I managed to pay the rent and that was astonishing. One day she’d be in one of my books. I was fucking a culture-bitch. I felt myself nearing a climax. I pushed my tongue into her mouth, kissed her, and climaxed. I rolled off feeling foolish. I held her a while, then she went into the bathroom. She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck.
    After that I visited Nicole 2 or 3 times a week in the mid-afternoons. We drank wine, talked, and now and then made love. I found I wasn’t particularly interested in her, it was just something to do. Lydia and I had made up the next day. She would question me about where I went in the afternoon. “I’ve been to the supermarket,” I’d tell her, and it was true. I’d go to the supermarket first.
    “I’ve never seen you spend so much time at the supermarket.” I got drunk one night and mentioned to Lydia that I knew a certain Nicole. I told her where Nicole lived, but that “not much was going on.” Why I told her this was not quite clear to me, but when one drinks one sometimes thinks unclearly… .
    One afternoon I was coming from the liquor store and had just reached Nicole’s. I was carrying two 6-packs of bottled beer and a pint of whiskey. Lydia and I had recently had another fight and I had decided to stay the night with Nicole. I was walking along, already a bit intoxicated, when I heard someone run up behind me. I turned. It was Lydia. “Ha!” she said. “Ha!”
    She grabbed the bag of liquor out of my hand and began pulling out the beer bottles. She smashed them on the pavement one by one. They made large explosions. Santa Monica Boulevard is very busy. The afternoon traffic was just beginning to build up. All this action was taking place just outside Nicole’s door. Then Lydia reached the pint of whiskey. She held it up and screamed up at me, “Ha! You were going to drink this and then you were going to FUCK her!” She smashed the pint on the cement.
    Nicole’s door was open and Lydia ran up the stairway. Nicole was standing at the top of the stairs. Lydia began hitting Nicole with her large purse. It had long straps and she swung it as hard as she could. “He’s my man! He’s my man! You stay away from my man!”
    Then Lydia ran down past me, out the door and into the street.
    “Good god,” said Nicole, “who was that?”
    “That was Lydia. Let me have a broom and a large paper bag.”
    I went down into the street and began sweeping up the broken glass and placing it in the brown paper bag. That bitch has gone too far this time, I thought. I’ll go and buy more liquor. I’ll stay the night with Nicole, maybe a couple of nights.
    I was bent over picking up the glass when I heard a strange sound behind me. I looked around. It was Lydia in the Thing. She had it up on the sidewalk and was driving straight towards me at about 30 m.p.h. I leaped aside as the car went by, missing me by an inch. The car ran down to the end of the block, bumped down off the curb, continued up the street, then took a right at the next corner and was gone.
    I went back to sweeping up the glass. I got it all swept up and put away. Then I reached down into the original paper bag and found one undamaged bottle of beer. It looked very good. I really needed it. I was about to unscrew the cap when someone grabbed it out of my hand. It was Lydia again. She ran up to Nicole’s door with the bottle and hurled it at the glass. She hurled it with such velocity that it went straight through like a large bullet, not smashing the entire window but leaving just a round hole.
    Lydia ran off and I walked up the stairway. Nicole was still standing there. “For god’s sake, Chinaski, leave with her before she kills everybody!”
    I turned and walked back down the stairway. Lydia was sitting in her car at the curbing with the engine running. I opened the door and got in. She drove off. Neither of us spoke a word.
    24
    I began receiving letters from a girl in New York City. Her name was Mindy. She had run across a couple of my books, but the best thing about her letters was that she seldom mentioned writing except to say that she was not a writer. She wrote about things in general and men and sex in particular. Mindy was 25, wrote in longhand, and the handwriting was stable, sensible, yet humorous. I answered her letters and was always glad to find one of hers in my mailbox. Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.
    Then Mindy sent some photographs. If they were faithful she was quite beautiful. We wrote for several more weeks and then she mentioned that she had a 2 week vacation coming up.
    Why don’t you fly out? I suggested.
    All right, she replied.
    We began to phone one another. Finally she gave me her arrival date at L.A. International.
    I’ll be there, I told her, nothing will stop me.
    25
    I kept the date in mind. It was never any problem creating a split with Lydia. I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn’t want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn’t understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores. But parties, dancing, small talk energized Lydia. She considered herself a sexpot. But she was a little too obvious. So our arguments often grew out of my wish for no-people-at-all versus her wish for as-many-people-as-often-as-possible.
    A couple of days before Mindy’s arrival I started it. We were on the bed together.
    “Lydia, for Christ’s sake, why are you so stupid? Don’t you realize I’m a loner? A recluse? I have to be that way to write.”
    “How can you learn anything about people if you don’t meet them?”
    “I already know all about them.”
    “Even when we go out to eat in a restaurant, you keep your head down, you don’t look at anybody.”
    “Why make myself sick?”
    “I observe people,” she said. “I study them.”
    “Shit!”
    “You’re afraid of people!”
    “I hate them.”
    “How can you be a writer? You don’t observe!”
    “O.K., I don’t look at people, but I earn the rent with my writing. It beats tending sheep.”
    “You’re not going to last. You’ll never make it. You’re doing it all wrong.”
    “That’s why I’m making it.”
    “Making it? Who the hell knows who you are? Are you famous like Mailer? Like Capote?”
    “They can’t write.”
    “But you can! Only you, Chinaski, can write!”
    “Yes, that’s how I feel.”
    “Are you famous? If you went to New York City, would anybody know you?”
    “Listen I don’t care about that. I just want to go on writing. I don’t need trumpets.”
    “You’d take all the trumpets you could get.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You like to pretend you’re already famous.”
    “I have always acted the same way, even before I wrote.”
    “You’re the most unknown famous man I ever met.”
    “I’m just not ambitious.”
    “You are but you’re lazy. You want it for nothing. When do you write anyhow? When do you do it? You’re always in bed or drunk or at the racetrack.”
    “I don’t know. It’s not important.”
    “What’s important then?”
    “You tell me,” I said.
    “Well, I’ll tell you what’s important!” Lydia said. “We haven’t had a party for a long time. I haven’t seen any people for a long time! I LIKE people! My sisters LOVE parties. They’ll drive a thousand miles to go to a party! That’s how we were raised in Utah! There’s nothing wrong with parties. It’s just people LETTING GO and having a good time! You’ve got this crazy idea in your head. You think having fun leads to fucking! Jesus Christ, people are decent! You just don’t know how to have a good time!”
    “I don’t like people,” I said.
    Lydia leaped off of the bed. “Jesus, you make me sick!”
    “All right, then, I’ll give you some room.”
    I swung my legs off the bed and began putting my shoes on.
    “Some room?” Lydia asked. “What do you mean by ‘some room’?”
    “I mean, I am getting the hell out of here!”
    “O.K., but listen to this: if you walk out the door now you won’t see me again!”
    “Fair enough,” I said.
    I stood up, walked to the door, opened it, closed it and walked down to the Volks. I started the engine and drove off. I had made some room for Mindy.
    26
    I sat in the airport and waited. You never knew about photos. You could never tell. I was nervous. I felt like vomiting. I lit a cigarette and gagged. Why did I do these things? I didn’t want her now. And Mindy was flying all the way from New York City. I knew plenty of women. Why always more women? What was I trying to do? New affairs were exciting but they were also hard work. The first kiss, the first fuck had some drama. People were interesting at first. Then later, slowly but surely, all the flaws and madness would manifest themselves. I would become less and less to them; they would mean less and less to me.
    I was old and I was ugly. Maybe that’s why it felt so good to stick it into young girls. I was King Kong and they were lithe and tender. Was I trying to screw my way past death? By being with young girls did I hope I wouldn’t grow old, feel old? I just didn’t want to age badly, simply quit, be dead before death itself arrived.
    Mindy’s plane landed and taxied in. I felt I was in danger. Women knew me beforehand because they had read my books. I had exposed myself. On the other hand, I knew nothing of them. I was the real gambler. I could get killed, I could get my balls cut off. Chinaski without balls. Love Poems of a Eunuch.
    I stood waiting for Mindy. The passengers came out of the gate.
    Oh, I hope she’s not the one.
    Or her.
    Or especially her.
    Now that one would be fine! Look at those legs, that behind, those eyes… .
    One of them moved towards me. I hoped it was her. She was the best of the whole damned lot. I couldn’t be that lucky. She walked up to me and smiled. “I’m Mindy.”
    “I’m glad you’re Mindy.”
    “I’m glad you’re Chinaski.”
    “Do you have to wait for your baggage?”
    “Yes, I brought enough for a long stay!”
    “Let’s wait in the bar.”
    We walked in and found a table. Mindy ordered a vodka and tonic. I ordered a vodka-7. Ah, almost in tune. I lit her cigarette. She looked fine. Almost virginal. It was difficult to believe. She was small, blond and perfectly put together. She was more natural than sophisticated. I found it easy to look at her eyes— blue-green. She wore 2 tiny earrings. And she wore high heels. I had told Mindy that high heels excited me.
    “Well,” she said, “are you frightened?”
    “Not so much anymore. I like you.”
    “You look much better than your photos,” she said. “I don’t think you’re ugly at all.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Oh, I don’t mean you’re handsome, not the way people think of handsome. Your face seems kind. But your eyes—they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire. God, something like that. I’m not very good with words.”
    “I think that you’re beautiful,” I said. “And very nice. I feel good around you. I think it’s good that we’re together. Drink up.
    We need another. You’re like your letters.”
    We had the second drink and went down for the luggage. I was proud to be with Mindy. She walked with style. So many women with good bodies just slouched along like overloaded creatures. Mindy flowed.
    I kept thinking, this is too good. This is simply not possible.
    Back at my place Mindy took a bath and changed clothes. She came out in a light blue dress. She had changed her hair style, just a bit. We sat on the couch together with the vodka and the vodka mix. “Well,” I said, “I’m still scared. I’m going to get a little drunk.”
    “Your place is just the way I thought it would be,” she said.
    She was looking at me, smiling. I reached out and touched her just behind the neck, moved her towards me, and gave her a light kiss.
    The phone rang. It was Lydia.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m with a friend.”
    “It’s a woman, isn’t it?”
    “Lydia, our relationship is over,” I said. “You know that.”
    “IT’S A WOMAN, ISN’T IT?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, all right.”
    “All right. Goodbye.”
    “Goodbye,” she said.
    Lydia’s tone had suddenly calmed down. I felt better. Her violence frightened me. She always claimed that I was the jealous one, and I was often jealous, but when I saw things working against me I simply became disgusted and withdrew. Lydia was different. She reacted. She was the Head Cheerleader at the Game of Violence.
    But by her tone I knew that she had given up. That she was not enraged. I knew that voice.
    “That was my ex,” I told Mindy.
    “Is it over?”
    “Yes.”
    “Does she still love you?”
    “I think so.”
    “Then it’s not over.”
    “It’s over.”
    “Should I stay?”
    “Of course. Please.”
    “You’re not just using me? I’ve read all those love poems … to Lydia.”
    “I was in love. And I’m not using you.”
    Mindy pressed her body against me and kissed me. It was a long kiss. My cock rose. I had recently been taking a lot of vitamin E. I had my own ideas about sex. I was constantly horny and masturbated continually. I’d make love to Lydia and then come back to my place and masturbate in the morning. The thought of sex as something forbidden excited me beyond all reason. It was like one animal knifing another into submission.
    When I came I felt it was in the face of everything decent, white sperm dripping down over the heads and souls of my dead parents. If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women—good women— frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn’t strong. So I continued to struggle with women, with the idea of women.
    Mindy and I finished the bottle and then went to bed. I kissed her for a while, then apologized, and drew away. I was too drunk to perform. One hell of a great lover. I promised her many great experiences in the near future, then fell asleep with her body pressed against me.
    In the morning I awakened, sickened. I looked at Mindy, naked next to me. Even then, after all the drinking, she was a miracle. Never had I known a young girl so beautiful and at the same time so gentle and intelligent. Where were her men? Where had they failed?
    I went into the bathroom and tried to get cleaned up. I gagged on Lavoris. I shaved and put on some shaving lotion. I wet my hair and combed it. I went to the refrigerator, took a 7-UP, drank it down.
    I went back to the bed and climbed in. Mindy was warm, her body was warm. She seemed to be asleep. I liked that. I rubbed my lips against hers, softly. My cock rose. I felt her breasts against me. I took one and sucked on it. I felt the nipple harden. Mindy stirred. I reached down and felt along her belly, down towards the cunt. I began rubbing her cunt, easily.
    It’s like making a rosebud open, I thought. This has meaning. This is good. It’s like two insects in a garden moving slowly towards each other. The male works his slow magic. The female slowly opens. I like it, I like it. Two bugs. Mindy is opening, she is getting wet. She is beautiful. Then I mounted her. I slid it in, my mouth on hers.
    27
    We drank all day and that night I tried again to make love to Mindy. I was astounded and dismayed to find she had a large pussy. An extra large pussy. I hadn’t noticed it the night before. That was a tragedy. Woman’s greatest sin. I worked and I worked. Mindy lay there as if she was enjoying it. I hoped to god she was. I began to sweat. My back ached. I was dizzy, sick. Her pussy seemed to get larger. I couldn’t feel anything. It was like trying to fuck a large, loose paper bag. I was just barely touching the sides of her cunt. It was agony, it was relentless work without a reward. I felt damned. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I desperately wanted to come. It wasn’t just the drinking. I performed better than most when drinking. I heard my heart. I felt my heart. I felt it in my chest. I felt it in my throat. I felt it in my head. I couldn’t bear it. I rolled off with a gasp.
    “Sorry, Mindy, Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.”
    “It’s all right, Hank,” she said.
    I rolled over on my stomach. I stank with sweat. I got up and poured two drinks. We sat upright in bed and drank the drinks, side by side. I couldn’t understand how I had managed to come the first time. We had a problem. All that beauty, all that gentleness, all that goodness, and we had a problem. I was unable to tell Mindy what it was. I didn’t know how to tell her she had a big cunt. Maybe nobody had ever told her.
    “It will be better when I’m not drinking so much,” I told her.
    “Please don’t worry, Hank.”
    “O.K.”
    We went to sleep or we pretended to go to sleep. Finally I did… .
    28
    Mindy stayed about a week. I introduced her to my friends. We went places. But nothing was resolved. I couldn’t climax. She didn’t seem to mind. It was strange.
    Around 10:45 PM one evening Mindy was drinking in the front room and reading a magazine. I was lying on the bed in just my shorts, drunk, smoking, a drink on the chair. I was staring at the blue ceiling, not feeling or thinking about anything.
    There was a knock on the front door.
    Mindy said, “Should I get it?”
    “Sure,” I said, “go ahead.”
    I heard Mindy open the door. Then I heard Lydia’s voice.
    “I just came over to check out my competition.”
    Oh, I thought, this is nice. I’ll get up and pour them both a drink, we’ll all drink together and talk. I like my women to understand each other.
    Then I heard Lydia say: “You’re acute little thing, aren’t you?”
    Then I heard Mindy scream. And Lydia screamed. I heard scuffling, grunts, bodies flying. Furniture was upset. Mindy screamed again—the scream of one being attacked. Lydia screamed—the tigress at the kill. I leaped out of bed. I was going to separate them. I ran into the front room in my shorts. It was a hair-pulling, spitting, scratching, mad scene. I ran over to pull them apart. I stumbled over one of my shoes on the rug, fell heavily. Mindy ran out the door with Lydia right behind. They ran down the walk toward the street. I heard another scream.
    Several minutes passed. I got up and closed the door. Evidently Mindy had gotten away because suddenly Lydia walked in. She sat down in a chair near the door. She looked at me.
    “I’m sorry. I’ve pissed myself.”
    It was true. There was a dark stain in her crotch and one pant leg was soaked.
    “It’s all right,” I said.
    I poured Lydia a drink and she sat there holding it in her hand. I couldn’t hold my drink in my hand. No one spoke. A short time later there was a knock on the door. I got up in my shorts and opened it. My huge, white, flabby belly hung out over the top of the shorts. Two policemen stood at the door.
    “Hello,” I said.
    “We’re answering a disturbance of the peace call.”
    “Just a little family argument,” I said.
    “We’ve got some details,” said the cop standing closest to me. “There are two women.”
    “There usually are,” I said.
    “All right,” said the first cop. “I just want to ask you one question.”
    “O.K.”
    “Which of the two women do you want?”
    “I’ll take that one.” I pointed to Lydia sitting in the chair, all pissed over herself.
    “All right, sir, are you sure?”
    “I’m sure.”
    The cops walked off and there I was with Lydia again.
    29
    The phone rang the next morning. Lydia had gone back to her place. It was Bobby, the kid who lived in the next block and worked in the porno bookstore. “Mindy’s down here. She wants you to come and talk to her.”
    “All right.”
    I walked over with 3 bottles of beer. Mindy was dressed in high heels and a black see-through outfit from Frederick’s. It resembled
    a doll’s dress and you could see her black panties. There was no brassiere. Valerie wasn’t around. I sat down and twisted the beer caps off, passed the bottles.
    “Are you going back to Lydia, Hank?” Mindy asked.
    “Sorry, yes. I’m back.”
    “That was rotten, what happened. I thought you and Lydia were finished?”
    “I thought we were. Those things are very strange.”
    “All my clothes are down at your place. I’ll have to come get them.”
    “Of course.”
    “Are you sure she’s gone?”
    “Yes.”
    “She acts like a bull, that woman, she acts like a dyke.”
    “I don’t think she is.”
    Mindy got up to go to the bathroom. Bobby looked at me. “I fucked her,” he said. “Don’t blame her. She had no other place to go.”
    “I don’t blame her.”
    “Valerie took her to Frederick’s to cheer her up. Got her a new outfit.”
    Mindy came out of the bathroom. She’d been crying.
    “Mindy,” I said, “I’ve got to go.”
    “I’ll be down later for my clothes.”
    I got up and walked out the door. Mindy followed me out there. “Hold me,” she said.
    I held her. She was crying.
    “You’re never going to forget me … never!”
    I walked back to my place thinking, I wonder if Bobby fucked Mindy? Bobby and Valerie were into lots of strange new things. I didn’t care for their lack of common feeling. It was the way they did everything without any show of emotion. The same way another person might yawn or boil a potato.
    30
    To pacify Lydia I agreed to go to Muleshead, Utah. Her sister was camping in the mountains. The sisters actually owned much of the land. It had been inherited from their father. Glendoline, one of the sisters, had a tent pitched in the woods. She was writing a novel, The Wild Woman of the Mountains. The other sisters were to arrive any day. Lydia and I arrived first. We had a pup tent. We squeezed in there the first night and the mosquitoes squeezed in with us. It was terrible.
    The next morning we sat around the campfire. Glendoline and Lydia cooked breakfast. I had purchased $40 worth of groceries which included several 6-packs of beer. I had them cooling in a mountain spring. We finished breakfast. I helped with the dishes and then Glendoline brought out her novel and read to us. It wasn’t really bad, but it was very unprofessional and needed a lot of polishing. Glendoline presumed that the reader was as fascinated by her life as she was—which was a deadly mistake. The other deadly mistakes she had made were too numerous to mention.
    I walked to the spring and came back with 3 bottles of beer. The girls said no, they didn’t want any. They were very anti-beer. We discussed Glendoline’s novel. I figured that anybody who would read their novel aloud to others had to be suspect. If that wasn’t the old kiss of death, nothing was.
    The conversation shifted and the girls started chatting about men, parties, dancing, and sex. Glendoline had a high, excited voice, and laughed nervously, laughed constantly. She was in her mid-forties, quite fat and very sloppy. Besides that, just like me, she was simply ugly.
    Glendoline must have talked nonstop for over an hour, entirely about sex. I began to get dizzy. She waved her arms over her head, “I’M THE WILD WOMAN OF THE MOUNTAINS! O WHERE O WHERE IS THE MAN, THE REAL MAN WITH THE COURAGE TO TAKE ME?”
    Well, he’s certainly not here, I thought.
    I looked at Lydia. “Let’s go for a walk.”
    “No,” she said, “I want to read this book.” It was called Love and
    Orgasm: A Revolutionary Guide to Sexual Fulfillment. “All right,” I said, “I’ll take a walk then.”
    I walked up to the mountain spring. I reached in for another beer, opened it and sat there drinking. I was trapped in the mountains and woods with two crazy women. They took all the joy out of fucking by talking about it all the time. I liked to fuck too, but it wasn’t my religion. There were too many ridiculous and tragic things about it. People didn’t seem to know how to handle it. So they made a toy out of it. A toy that destroyed people.
    The main thing, I decided, was to find the right woman. But how? I had a red notebook and a pen with me. I scribbled a meditative poem into it. Then I walked up to the lake. Vance Pastures, the place was called. The sisters owned most of it. I had to take a shit. I took off my pants and squatted in the brush with the flies and the mosquitoes. I’d take the conveniences of the city any time. I had to wipe with leaves. I walked over to the lake and stuck one foot in the water. It was ice cold.
    Be a man, old man. Enter.
    My skin was ivory white. I felt very old, very soft. I moved out into the ice water. I went in up to my waist, then I took a deep breath and leaped forward. I was all the way in! The mud swirled up from the bottom and got into my ears, my mouth, my hair. I stood there in the muddy water, my teeth chattering.
    I waited a long time for the water to settle and clear. Then I walked back out. I got dressed and made my way along the edge of the lake. When I got to the end of the lake I heard a sound like that of a waterfall. I went into a forest, moving toward the sound. I had to climb around some rocks across a gully. The sound came closer and closer. The flies and mosquitoes swarmed all over me. The flies were large and angry and hungry, much larger than city flies, and they knew a meal when they saw one.
    I pushed my way through some thick brush and there it was: my first real honest-to-Christ waterfall. The water just poured down the mountain and over a rocky ledge. It was beautiful. It kept coming and coming. That water was coming from somewhere. And it was running off somewhere. There were 3 or 4 streams that probably led to the lake.
    Finally I got tired of watching it and decided to go back. I also decided to take a different route back, a shortcut. I worked my way down to the opposite side of the lake and cut off toward camp. I knew about where it was. I still had my red notebook. I stopped and wrote another poem, less meditative, then I went on. I kept walking. The camp didn’t appear. I walked some more. I looked around for the lake. I couldn’t find the lake, I didn’t know where it was. Suddenly it hit me: I was LOST. Those horny sex bitches had driven me out of my mind and now I was LOST. I looked around. There was the backdrop of mountains and all around me were trees and brush. There was no center, no starting point, no connection between anything. I felt fear, real fear. Why had I let them take me out of my city, my Los Angeles? A man could call a cab there, he could telephone. There were reasonable solutions to reasonable problems.
    Vance Pastures stretched out around me for miles and miles. I threw away my red notebook. What a way for a writer to die! I could see it in the newspaper:
    HENRY CHINASKI, MINOR
    POET, FOUND DEAD IN
    UTAH WOODS
    Henry Chinaski, former post office clerk turned writer, was found in a decomposed state yesterday afternoon by forest ranger W. K. Brooks Jr. Also found near the remains was a small red notebook which evidently contained Mr. Chinaski’s last written work.
    I walked on. Soon I was in a soggy area full of water. Every now and then one of my legs would sink to the knee in the bog and I’d have to haul myself out.
    I came to a barbed wire fence. I knew immediately that I shouldn’t climb the fence. I knew that it was the wrong thing to do, but there seemed no alternative. I climbed over the fence and stood there, cupped both hands around my mouth and screamed: “LYDIA!”
    There was no answer.
    I tried it again: “LYDIA!”
    My voice sounded very mournful. The voice of a coward.
    I moved on. It would be nice, I thought, to be back with the sisters, hearing them laugh about sex and men and dancing and parties. It would be so nice to hear Glendoline’s voice. It would be nice to run my hand through Lydia’s long hair. I’d faithfully take her to every party in town. I’d even dance with all the women and make brilliant jokes about everything. I’d endure all that subnormal driveling shit with a smile. I could almost hear myself. “Hey, that’s a great dance tune! Who wants to really go? Who wants to boogie on out?”
    I kept walking through the bog. Finally I reached dry land. I got to a road. It was just an old dirt road, but it looked good. I could see tire marks, hoof prints. There were even wires overhead that carried electricity somewhere. All I had to do was follow those wires. I walked along the road. The sun was high in the sky, it must have been noon. I walked along feeling foolish.
    I came to a locked gate across the road. What did that mean? There was a small entry at one side of the gate. Evidently the gate was a cattle guard. But where were the cattle? Where was the owner of the cattle? Maybe he only came around every six months.
    The top of my head began to ache. I reached up and felt where I had been blackjacked in a Philadelphia bar 30 years before. Some scar tissue remained. Now the scar tissue, baked by the sun, was swollen. It stood up like a small horn. I broke a piece off and threw it in the road.
    I walked another hour, then decided to turn back. It meant having to walk all the way back yet I felt it was the thing to do. I took my shirt off and draped it over my head. I stopped once or twice and screamed, “LYDIA!” There was no reply.
    Some time later I got back to the gate. All I had to do was walk around it but there was something in the way. It stood in front of the gate, about 15 feet from me. It was a small doe, a fawn, a something.
    I moved slowly toward it. It didn’t budge. Was it going to let me by? It didn’t seem to fear me. I guessed it sensed my confusion, my cowardice. I approached closer and closer. It wouldn’t get out of the way. It had large beautiful brown eyes, more beautiful than the eyes of any woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t believe it. I was within 3 feet of it, ready to back off, when it bolted. It ran off the road and into the woods. It was in excellent shape; it could really run.
    As I walked further along the road I heard the sound of running water. I needed water. You couldn’t live very long without water. I left the road and moved toward the sound of rushing water. There was a little hill covered with grass and as I topped the hill there it was: water spilling out of several cement pipes in the face of a dam and into some kind of reservoir. I sat down at the edge of the reservoir and took off my shoes and stockings, pulled up my pants, and stuck my legs into the water. Then I poured water over my head. Then I drank—but not too much or too fast—just like I’d seen it done in the movies.
    After recovering a bit I noticed a pier that went out over the reservoir. I walked out on the pier and came to a large metal box bolted to the side of the pier. It was locked with a padlock. There was probably a telephone in there! I could phone for help!
    I went and found a large rock and started smashing it against the lock. It wouldn’t give. What the hell would Jack London do? What would Hemingway do? Jean Genet?
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