More Notes of a Dirty Old Man Read Free

“We knew you were coming by.”
    Bukowski goes out into the kitchen of the Desert Workshop Printery and gets one. The interview is over. The great poet Bukowski and the great editor Webb sit across from each other, looking in and out and over with glazed and perhaps? immortal spirits. Life goes on anyhow.

    I was going over my old Racing Forms , having a beer and a smoke, really hungover, shaky, depressed; gently thinking suicide but still hoping for a lucky angel when there was a knock on the door, a very light knock, I barely heard it. I listened and there it was again. I hid my bag of Chesterfields under the fireplace and opened the door just a slit. “Bukowski?” said the voice. “Charles Bukowski?” and there was this woman standing out in a light rain, in the 9 p.m. rain between 2 dying plants on the front porch of the front court in which I lived, badly, among beer, and mouse-shadows, and old copies of Upton Sinclair and Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis, and I looked out looked out looked out and IT WAS A WOMAN and WHAT a woman in that 9 p.m. rain—long red hair all down the back, jesus: tons of red miracle. And the face, open with passion, like a flower ripped open with the fingers from the bud, a kind of fire-cheating, and the body, the body was nothing but SEX, sex standing still jumping singing looking flowing humming in the 9 p.m. rain saying, “Bukowski, Charles Bukowski?” and I said, “Come on in,” and she did, she came in and sat on the chair in front of the fireplace and the walls of the room began to weave in and out like on a trip, and the rug said, what the hell oh my god oooh oooooooooooh, and she CROSSED HER LEGS and the skirt was high and I looked up the thighs, boldly, jesus, I was out of my skull, thighs knees high heels long tight stockings flow and flesh oh lord and she kicked her foot, turned on ankle, ow ow ow, mercy! And the red hair the red hair flocked all along the back of the chair, the red hair on fire in the lamplight, I could barely hold on I could barely understand, I did not deserve to even LOOK, and I knew it.
    “Care for a beer?” I asked.
    “All right,” she said.
    I got up and I could hardly walk. I had enough hose to put out a forest fire of napalm.
    I came back with the beer, didn’t give her a glass, watched her drink it from the bottle, that stuff going into her, into her red hair into her body into her everywhere and I peered up her legs not getting enough and I drank out of the bottle.
    She put down her bottle. “You are a great writer,” she said.
    “That’s no reason for coming to see me.”
    “Yes it is, yes it is. You see you fascinate me, you write this way and you look like, you look like—”
    “The trashman?”
    “Yes, or a diseased gorilla, an undergrown aged gorilla dying of cancer. And those goddamn eyes, slits of eyes but when you finally OPEN them for just that second—shit, I never saw eyes LIKE THAT, that COLOR, that VICIOUS FIRE—”
    “And you came here to see what I was, see what I am, oh?”
    “I guess so. I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t. I only know that I’m here. I can’t help it. You’re a gorilla. You’re some kind of snake. You’re anything filthy. You stink. I don’t know you. I know that you’re not the guy at Bryan’s staff meetings, threatening cripples, staggering about the room, cursing everybody and looking for more to drink more to drink more to drink. Such a swine you are!”
    “A woman always wants to find the core, tame it, mold it; a wise man never shows the core to a woman. He just gives her a shot of light, shuts it off, becomes himself again. A woman practices rearing the child by taming the man first. I’ve got no use for women except to fuck them. I won’t be trapped in. Love is a form of selfishness. Love is an excuse for cowards to quit.”
    “Nicely spoken. Sounds all right, bastard, but what does it mean?”
    She lifted her beerbottle again, recrossed her legs, the