More Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

Author:Charles Bukowski [Bukowski, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Tags: Newspaper, Journalism
ISBN: 0872865436
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I figured 500-plus air might make this community college outside Detroit worth my soul so I got on American and worked the stewardesses for extra drinks. I was to land a day early, and I made it down the ramp waiting for some professor to grab me and one did and I told him, “I’m yours now. How can you tell what you’ve got until it gets off the plane?”

“We can’t. My job’s more or less on the line each time but it’s worth it.” Each year he went out and got one. It had been Ginsberg, Stephen Spender and James Dickey in the last three years and he still had his job. I warned him that I had been thrown out of the women’s dorm at the University of Kansas after a reading and we walked toward his car. He drove me to a hotel in Detroit and left me with a mass of phone numbers and instructions. The university was getting the room and board, he assured me. After he left I took a shower and phoned down for drinks.

I had been drinking an hour or so—picking out my poems—when the phone rang. It was my buddy Slim de Bouffe who came in at 5 feet and 265 pounds and played with poems and booze and women. He liked my shit. When he knocked on the door the room knocked back. He wrote poems with a hammer. I told him to come on in.

There wasn’t much to the night, mostly drinking, and stories about bad luck with women and good luck with women; about the poetry hustle and the poetry grind and about some of the good people in it and some of the other kind. Slim had a way of dropping little wisdoms out of his mouth as if they didn’t count, as if he were asking for a match or giving directions to the nearest whorehouse. You had to listen carefully to Slim but it was worth it. It was worth some hours of listening. He left late that night and I went to bed and slept in that 100-year-old hotel in the middle of Murder City and I slept well.

Awakening was another matter. I was on the fourth floor and the windows looked out on a building with a flagpole on top of it. I gagged, went to the bathroom, had a minor vomit, opened a warm beer and got the switchboard woman.

“Yes sir?”

“I have a complaint.”

“Yes sir?”

“Look, I’m going to be here 2 or 3 nights which means that I’m going to wake up with 2 or 3 hangovers.”

“You’d better send your complaint to God, sir.”

“All right, connect me.”

“He’s unlisted.”

“Don’t I know. Look, as I was saying, I’m going to wake up here every morning and you know the first sight that will meet my eyes?”

“No, I don’t, sir.”

“The American flag.”

“The American flag?”

“Absolutely.”

“You mean you don’t like the American flag, sir?”

“Of course not. It has these red and white stripes, they wave in the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.