South of No North by Bukowski Charles

Author:Bukowski, Charles [Bukowski, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2009-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

A SHIPPING CLERK WITH A RED NOSE

When I first met Randall Harris he was 42 and lived with a grey haired woman, one Margie Thompson. Margie was 45 and not too handsome. I was editing the little magazine Mad Fly at the time and I had come over in an attempt to get some material from Randall.

Randall was known as an isolationist, a drunk, a crude and bitter man but his poems were raw, raw and honest, simple and savage. He was writing unlike anybody else at the time. He worked as a shipping clerk in an auto parts warehouse.

I sat across from both Randall and Margie. It was 7:15 p.m. and Harris was already drunk on beer. He set a bottle in front of me. I’d heard of Margie Thompson. She was an old-time communist, a world-saver, a do-gooder. One wondered what she was doing with Randall who cared for nothing and admitted it. “I like to photograph shit,” he told me, “that’s my art.”

Randall had begun writing at the age of 38. At 42, after three small chapbooks (Death Is a Dirtier Dog Than My Country, My Mother Fucked an Angel, and The Piss-Wild Horses of Madness), he was getting what might be called critical acclaim. But he made nothing on his writing and he said, “I’m nothing but a shipping clerk with the deep blue blues.” He lived in an old front court in Hollywood with Margie, and he was weird, truly. “I just don’t like people,” he said. “You know, Will Rogers once said, ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’ Me, I never met a man I liked.”

But Randall had humor, an ability to laugh at pain and at himself. You liked him. He was an ugly man with a large head and a smashed-up face—only the nose seemed to have escaped the general smashup. “I don’t have enough bone in my nose, it’s like rubber,” he explained. His nose was long and very red.

I had heard stories about Randall. He was given to smashing windows and breaking bottles against the wall. He was one nasty drunk. He also had periods where he wouldn’t answer the door or the telephone. He didn’t own a T.V., only a small radio and he only listened to symphony music—strange for a guy as crude as he was.

Randall also had periods when he took the bottom off the telephone and stuffed toilet paper around the bell so it wouldn’t ring. It stayed that way for months. One wondered why he had a phone. His education was sparse but he’d evidently read most of the best writers.

“Well, fucker,” he said to me, “I guess you wonder what I’m doing with her?” he pointed to Margie.

I didn’t answer.

“She’s a good lay,” he said, “and she gives me some of the best sex west of St. Louis.”

This was the same guy who had written four or five great love poems to a woman called Annie. You wondered how it worked.

Margie just sat there and grinned.

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