Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski

Author:Charles Bukowski
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780872861558
Publisher: City Lights Publishers

A DOLLAR AND 20 CENTS

he liked the end of Summer best, no Fall, maybe it was Fall, anyhow, it got cold down at the beach and he liked to walk along the water right after sundown, no people around and the water looked dirty, the water looked deathly, and the seagulls didn’t want to sleep, hated to sleep. the seagulls came down, flew down wanting his eyes, his soul, what was left of his soul.

if you don’t have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul.

then he’d sit down and look across the water and when you looked across the water, everything was hard to believe. say like there was a nation like China or the U.S. or someplace like Vietnam. or that he’d once been a child. no, come to think of it, that wasn’t so hard to believe; he’d had a hell of a childhood, he couldn’t forget that. and the manhood: all the jobs and all the women, and then no woman, and now no job. a bum at 60. finished. nothing. he had a dollar and 20 cents in cash. a week’s rent paid. the ocean .... he thought back over the women. some of them had been good to him. others had simply been shrews, scratchers, a little crazy and terribly hard. rooms and beds and houses and Christmases and jobs and singing and hospitals, and dullness, dull days and nights and no meaning, no chance.

now 60 years worth: a dollar and 20 cents.

then he heard them behind him laughing. they had blankets and bottles and cans of beer, coffee and sandwiches. they laughed, they laughed. 2 young boys, 2 young girls. slim, pliable bodies. not a care. then one of them saw him.

“Hey, what’s THAT?”

“Jesus, I dunno!”

he didn’t move.

“is it human?”

“does it breathe? does it screw?”

“screw WHAT?”

they all laughed.

he lifted his wine bottle. there was something left. it was a good time for it.

“it MOVES! look, it MOVES!”

he stood up, brushed the sand from his pants.

“it has arms, legs! it has a face!”

“a FACE?”

they laughed again. he could not understand. kids were not this way. kids were not bad. what were these?

he walked up to them.

“there’s no shame in old age.”

one of the young boys was finishing off a beercan. he threw it to one side.

“there’s a shame in wasted years, pops. you look like waste to me.”

“I’m still a good man, son.”

“supposin’ one of these girls put some pussy on you, pops, what would you do?”

“Rod, don’t TALK that way!”

a young girl with long red hair spoke. she was arranging her hair in the wind, she seemed to sway in the wind, her toes hooked into the sand.

“how about it, pops? what would you do? huh? what would you do if one of these girls laid it on you?”

he started to walk, he walked around their blanket up the sand toward the boardwalk.

“Rod, why’d you talk to that poor old man that way? sometimes I HATE you!”

“COM’ERE, baby!”

“NO!”

he turned around and saw Rod chasing the girl.

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