It must have been a Thousand Years ago, but I used to pick up the Los Angeles Free Press when I could find it, and I read it religiously. It is a very good sign when I Google for a result and the Autofill completes the search. It tells me that others are still interested in the late Charles Bukowski and his lost column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man".
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/cbukowski/2011/09/cb/
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Excerpt from More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns
By Charles Bukowski
September 17, 2011
Memoir
Monday afternoon was my day to see the girl. She was 7.
The hangover wasn’t too bad and I drove down to Santa Monica via Pico Boulevard. When I got there the door was open. I pushed in. She was writing a note. The mother of my child. Her name was Vicki.
“I was just going to leave you this note. Louise is at Cindy’s.â€
“O.K.â€
“Look. Could I have some money?â€
“How much?â€
“Well, I could use $45 now.â€
“I can only let you have 20.â€
“All right.â€
She lived in an unfurnished one-bedroom Synanon apt., $130 a month. Vicki was one of those who had to always belong to some organization . . . she had gone from poetry reading workshops to the communist party to Synanon. Whenever she became insulated she went to a new organization. Well, that was as sensible as anything else.
We walked over to Cindy’s. Cindy was black. The 2 girls played with their paper dolls on the floor. Her mother was white, fat and in bed.
“She’s got asthma,†Vicki said to me.
“Hello,†I said to Cindy’s mother.
Cindy’s father wasn’t about. He was on the cure and working a gas station.
“Will you drive me to Synanon?†Vicki asked. “Or I can take the bus.â€
(Synanon had a bus line too.)
“All right,†I said, “I’ll drive you down.â€
“Come on, Louise,†she said, “pick up your stuff and let’s go.â€
“But, Mommy, I just want to get this last dress on the doll.â€
“All right, but hurry up†. . .
I left Vicki off in front of the building. Then we drove east.
“Where we going, Hank?â€
“To the beach, I guess.â€
“But I wanted to go to the Synanon beach . . .â€
“The beaches are all alike . . . there’s dirty water and dirty sand.â€
Louise began sobbing. “But I wanted the Synanon beach! They don’t like war! They don’t kill people!â€
“Look, little one, we’re almost at the other beach. Let’s try it anyhow.â€
“But people don’t carry guns at Synanon!â€
“You’re probably right, but I’m afraid that sometimes we still need guns just like we need knives and forks.â€
“Silly,†she said, “you can’t eat with a gun!â€
“A lot of people do,†I said.
It was winter and cold and there weren’t many cars about or people either. Louise had had lunch at noon but I hadn’t eaten yet. We walked into the little Jewish grocery store next to the candleshop. I got a hotdog, some chips and a 7-UP. Louise got some kind of candy cracker and a 7-UP. We walked to the last cement table near the water.
“It’s cold,†I said. “Let’s turn our backs to the sea.â€
So we sat there facing the boardwalk. There were 14 or 15 people about but they had the strange tranquility of the seagulls, the winter seagulls. No, it wasn’t a tranquility but a deadness. They were like bugs. They simply stood or sat together, motionless, not talking.
“It’s too bad I have to look at those people,†I said, biting into my hotdog.
“Why don’t you want to look at them?â€
“They have no desire.â€
“What’s ‘Desire’?â€
“Well, let’s see. ‘Desire’ is wanting something you usually can’t get right when you want it, but if you have enough ‘Desire’ you can sometimes get it anyhow . . . Oh, hell—that sounds like ‘Ambition’ which is something you’re trained to do instead of something you want to do . . . Let’s just say that those people don’t want anything.â€
“Those people don’t want anything?â€
“Right. In a sense, nothing affects them so they don’t want anything, they aren’t anything. Especially in Western Civilization.â€
“But that’s the way they are. Maybe that’s a good way to be.â€
“Some wise men say so. I guess all of everything is how you work at it. A direction. I still don’t like to look at those people while I’m eating.â€
“Hank! You’re not nice! There’s nothing wrong with those people! I ought to slap you across the face with this cracker!â€
She picked up the cracker as if to hit me with it. I thought that was very funny. I laughed. She laughed too. We both felt good together, at last.
We finished eating and walked down toward the water. I sat down on a little cliff above the water and wet shore, and Louise built a sand castle . . .
It was then that I noticed the two men walking along the waterfront from the east. And the one man walking along the waterfront from the west. They all appeared to be in their mid-twenties. The man walking from the west had a large bag and seemed to be stopping and picking things up and dropping them into this bag. He didn’t seem to sense the two men approaching him from the east, but there was still quite a football field between them. 2 football fields.
The two walking from the east had on heavy boots and kicked at things along the shore. The one from the west almost swayed in the wind, bending over, picking up things for his paper sack. And I thought, it’s too bad, but the poor guy with the paper sack doesn’t realize that the other two guys are going to jump on him and beat him up. Can’t he realize that? It was a surety. And since I sensed it, I couldn’t understand how the guy with the bag couldn’t sense it. And the lifeguard in his little white shack on stilts . . . couldn’t he see?
It almost happened in front of me. All the men had beards but the 2 from the east had shorter beards; their beards almost looked angry . . . The guy with the paper sack just had hair all over his face and neck and back and front and everywhere. Then he looked up and saw the other two
. . . He tried to walk around them, on the side toward the sea. Just then a wave rolled in and the guy nearest him pushed him into the water. His paper sack went out with the tide.
As he got up, the other guy hit him and he went down again and then they were kicking at his body and his face with their boots. At first he held his hands over his face, then his hands fell away, but they kept kicking at his face.
Then they rolled him over and took something out of his pocket. A wallet. They took something out of the wallet and then threw the wallet far out into the sea.
Then they looked around and saw me sitting there. They looked at me. It was a kind of zoo thing—the way monkeys looked at you. They could see that I was old but they could see that I was big too, and I looked bigger in that black lumberjack my landlord had given me.
I looked at their faces and noticed that they were not particularly brave faces. I turned to the kid and told her, “You stay up here on the sand . . .â€
Then I leaped from the cliff and hit the wet sand and walked toward them. I pulled the switchblade, hit the button and the blade jumped out.
They didn’t move. Their game. I moved forward.
Then one guy started running and the other guy moved after him. They ran down the shore, around the pile of searocks and were gone. The lifeguard still stared out
at sea . . .
I walked over to the guy and turned him over. Sand was mixed in with blood and hair. I took the sea water as it came in and splashed it over his face. Hair grew upon his face where it wasn’t supposed to grow. It grew right in near the nose. I don’t mean under it, I mean right around the edges of the nose. Up by the eyes. There was a bird-like thing about him, an inhuman thing about him. I disliked him. I helped him up.
“You o.k.?â€
“Yeah. Yeah. But they took my money. 3 dollars. My money’s gone.â€
I picked him up and walked him over to a small cliff, away from Louise and sat him down.
“I live under the pier,†he said.
“Are you serious?â€
“5 years now. I think it’s been 5 years.â€
“I can only give you a dollar.â€
“Will you?â€
“Here.â€
The dollar seemed to bring him out of it.
“Do you live around here?†he asked.
“No. Los Angeles.â€
“How do you make it?â€
“Luck, I guess.â€
Then Louise waved from her sand castle. I waved back. My friend and I looked out at sea. A small ugly boat of some sort was slowly passing by out there, doing something.
Then my friend said, “Yesterday 2 guys were sucking each other off under the pier and some plain-clothes cops caught them and locked them up. Do you think that’s right?â€
“Well, I don’t know,†I said.
“I mean,†he said, “if 2 guys want to suck each other off, that’s their business, isn’t it?â€
“Well, looking at it from that angle, I suppose you’re right . . . But look, I’ve got to check on my little girl right now.â€
I walked over and sat down by Louise.
My friend walked up the sand toward the boardwalk.
She smiled at me:
“You like my castle?†she asked.
I looked.
“It’s beautiful,†I said, “but better than that, it’s very nice.â€
“What’s the difference between ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Very nice’?â€
“Well, ‘Beautiful’ is usually what people say when they don’t mean it and ‘it’s very nice’ is usuallyhat they way when they really mean it.â€
“Oh.â€
It was a very nice sand castle. We both hated to leave it there like that, so we smashed it down with our feet. Then she held my hand as we walked across the sand toward the parking lot. There were quite some hours left in our Monday together and we needed something different to do.
Copyright © 2011 by the Estate of Charles Bukowski. Afterword copyright © 2011 by David Stephen Calonne.
Photo by Michael Montfort, printed with kind permission of Daisy Montfort. Copyright © 2011 by Daisy Monfort for the Estate of Michael Monfort.
Used with permission by City Lights Books.
</blockquote>But I am not a heavy reader, and as I've said, it must have been a Thousand years ago.
