JOHN was a writer who had never been published and wanted to be the great one on top of it all. He owned all of the books by the master and kept them in a shrine of a shelf. A small picture of the hero hung above this shelf, framed in simple wood.
John had agonized over the placement of the picture. To the left near the wall where the shelf met it, above the beginning where he had started the order of the library? In the center where it would hold dominion over them, the scarred face looking over the sequence of work as satisfied Buddha? To the right of them all? Hanging before the distance of plaster to the edge where the jam met the door, a final resting place near the end, moving with each new acquisition?
He decided on the middle. Buddha Bukowski. He owned all the recommendations from the great writer. The Fante, the Hamsun, the Celine, the Dostoyevsky. John had been unable to wade through the forest of Fyodor Mikhailovich’s search for the man within man. It was a labor outside of the factories or the dull flick of papers bearing importance of shipment. Oh how John wished that his face was a boiled mass, just like the hero. Oh how he puled for a father as cruel as the drunk knights-errant. Oh if only tragedy could be the war of his guts. Oh for the whore’s in a bombed out apartment. Real living, real success. Oh to hate those photographers with their flashbulbs in the flypapered rooms. Real living, real love.
John read the books all night beside his own typewriter in his careful desk space. John walked to the liquor store every day and drank and drank and drank. John did not have to work. John had been lucky. He had his luck from the start and hated his luck since he learned to. John’s parents had died. They were tender, nurturing, caring, and had paid for his humanities education in full. The car crash had been worth a house, which John had sold, and dual policies for over half a million dollars.
John was set for the luck and the life ahead of it. John started reading Buddha Bukowski in college, in his third year. John wanted to be a writer. John started writing. He kept one of he fat books next to his typer all the time, writing the lines as the great dead one had. Every stanza and narrative movement he made alive on the page a dying imitation of the writer’s struggle.
John took the money, the typer and a case to Los Angeles and got a room above a bar. He drank in the bars and tried to meet the whores of another man’s thirty years past. He couldn’t find them. They were all gone. Nothing strange happened. All the people did in the bars was sit and watch the game. Then he understood why. He got the new great Buddha-shit from the store and read the poem about how television was just coming in and something in America had died that day. He understood then, a new revelation of his love from the genius. His future. His work the being he could never be.
He cursed the television. He had cursed his parents, had wondered the luck from their passing and wanted the hard real life and repulsed recognition of the lettered tops of the literary dog’s teeth. He wanted to perform readings. He started performing readings. The poems were heckled and booed with copycat whistles and walkouts. The few who were searching for something new after the impact and lasting endurance of Buddha Bukowski’s bombs yelled the name of the writer out loud in the bookstores and the coffeehouses. “Bukow-ski!”
John went back to his room above the bar and kept writing more and more, his little library there, and the little picture in the little frame, listening to the classical music on a little red radio, reading nothing but the great writer, the recommendations sitting. The sometimes ventured, but unbroken spines the jury of his inaction.
John had not worked in a factory. John had not been a drunk for thirty years. John had bought and paid for two prostitutes but had not lived with any of them. The prostitutes had not been drunks. They had been addicted to cocaine. They put it in their arms. It scared John when they poked. It scared him when they were on it. He was most scared when they were sucking him off, both times. He thought that the cocaine would make their teeth clench at the moment of release. He thought he might become a character in one of the great writer’s stories.
He wrote about the factories and being a thirty year drunk. He was not even thirty years old yet. He wrote about having a mean and terrible father and having to slave over the tiniest for the littlest absence of anything. His lies and sincerity at the discredit of his work a shuffled thing under the rug of mental mechanism.
Day into morning new night he sat at the type. A book always open beside it. He began to follow every pattern and applied his own observations. Nothing seemed to be working out. He was sending it everywhere, just like the roadmap had moved him. To the bigs and the smalls they went out and nothing came back. Not a rejection slip. Not one. There was no receipt for any of it. He entered all the contests and had mailed copies with letters on the front of them to hundreds of agent’s. He called them afterwards, the secretary saying that nothing had arrived, and no, they did not know of any stories submitted to the offices of either publication under his name. And no, he should not call back a little later to see if there had been some kind of oversight and his work had managed to find it’s way to a messiahs blotter.
Nothing was working. John still had his luck, his degree, and the inheritance. He could have sat down and done anything, but John wanted to be a writer. When he sat at the desk, or sneered at the streets, or contemplated the women walking down them, he wanted to be a writer. He worked on his own experiences for a while. He wrote about sitting in his hotel room above the bar and looking at the walls going mad up them with radio flyer wheels. He wrote letters to major newspapers about the struggle with the decision on what buy to eat, ham or pastrami, and how choice was a prison unprotested. He wrote about putting his poems and stories in envelopes and then walking down the Los Angeles hot streets that were long and empty and putting them in the mailbox. The curved chute door slamming shut with the gong of his assured success.
He sent them out to all the same people and places again. If God and a calculator were keeping tally, John spent as much as a compact car on stamps, paper, and pops on the way. The summer melted the envelopes in his hand with his sweat on the way sometimes. He would look down and see the damp splotch on the pulp container and then tear it open to see if the moisture had smudged the lines on the typed pages.
Nothing came back. Not a slip, nary a letter. No one was there. He was hitting a brick wall with little bits of paper. To hell with them, he thought when he walked down to the front desk and the clerk shook his head again before he had made it to the bottom of the stairs. They don’t know the new genius and it’s just going to take time. He sent story and poem to the house that Bukowski built. No response. He sent script and screenplay to all the agents in Hollywood. Not a word.
He mailed the stuff in to the underground papers. Not a response. He called one of the papers up one day, wanting to know why ‘Wicker Dreams’ by Jane Forest had been published instead of his monumental work ‘Two Scotch and Waters Taste Good to Me’. A fifteen page poem about an afternoon where he had drank scotch and waters in a bar and then walked outside and up the street to his hotel where he got in the door and then into bed to sleep.
“Undercurrents.” The voice on the other end said.
“Hello. I’m John Hargrove and I sent a story to you…”
“John Hargrove? Is this the guy who wrote ‘Old Hours Hard on the Sweat Soaked Floor?”
“Why yes, it is.” John said, affecting the gravel in his voice from the quarry of his imagination.
“Listen man. Don’t send us anymore stuff. Even better, quit writing. Or start doing something that isn’t a shameless rip-off of a real poet. This stuff is hackneyed plagiarism at best, dirty piss at worst. I wouldn't clean the underneath of my buggering uncles foreskin with this drivel.”
And with that, the voice on the other end of the phone hung up.
John stood there with the phone in his hand and slammed it down, cracking the receiver along the side. He sat down at his table and looked at his typewriter. Then he turned and looked at all the books along the wall and his three clean shirts folded along the other chair in the room. He got up out of his chair and went to the window and opened it. The hot sounds of the street steamed through. He poked his head out and thought about how good a photograph of him poking his head out of the window would look in People magazine. The caption:
John Hargrove, Contemplating The Soon To Be
Regretted Rejection At The Hand Of An Underground
Newsweekly, Is Poised For Success.
He brought his head back in and then went down to the typer and took one of the books from the little shelf. He opened it up, read some and then started writing a story about a man who worked at a meatpacking plant and wound up having sex with all the secretaries there. Three of them.
One had red hair, the other brown, and another had black hair. The last one begged the hero to stay with her forever; his love was hotter than any other before him. But the hero said that meatpacking was his only game and he had something special to share with all the women of the world. If only for a short time. Then he slapped her across the face and walked out into the cold plastic night. Out to a bar where the booze would never stop from the flow of the stiff severance check.
After he had checked it and rechecked it on the draft he typed it in again. He typed all of his stories even though he could have afforded a wagon of computers to do his work on. He retyped it and relished the hard soul that came out of the page. An immortal story. Destined for the shelves in the future. Some trembling young buck taking it at random from the ledge, opening it up, and sneezing from the gold dust that would have moulded within those pages. The prose a rare and precious thing, the magic coming off the page made into value. The alchemy of his literature.
He gave his head a little jerk real quick and walked towards the door. He opened it up and then walked out into the hallway. He had met no one that lived next to him and they never made any noise. He walked down the stairs and out on the street. He walked down it and then saw a bar and decided to brush up. The door opened in front of him and the smoke rolled out. The television was on and the three people in there, a man, a woman, and a figure in the back were all watching it.
The bartender was watching the TV as well, his elbow a lean on the surface. John walked to the bar, sat down, and worked through the best material. Waiting for the skeleton to dance and the whore to burn. The woman was over fifty years old and her mouth was hanging open. Everyone in the bar except the bartender had a drink.
“Hey.” John said.
The bartender turned and looked at John and walked over to him. He was wearing a white shirt. Not dirty enough, John thought. Where’s your street? He wondered.
“What can I get for you?” the bartender asked.
“I’ll get a … scotch and water.” John said. Cool, yeah. “And a newspaper.”
“Okay.”
The bartender walked off to make it happen. John sat there and looked at the television. Cars, Formula One, lap one hundred seventy five. The green one passed the red one and then gained a bit. The angle changed and a blue one went past a black one close to the wheels. John looked for the rough beauty in it. Searching for the hard truth in the cruise.
Nothing came; there was no fuel or fertile soil. The weeds were choking the new stuff. Where’s my scotch and water? He thought. With command from the third eye the bartender walked up to John with the scotch and water and the newspaper under his arm. He put the drink down and the paper beside it. John paid, thanked the man, and the bartender walked back to the end of the bar where his lilting tilt was resumed without true interruption.
The paper opened in his hands and John got the update. War. Health. Corruption. A monkey that could smoke. He went through the front section, eating the letters to the editor. Chewing the op Ed. Where did they think this stuff up? In their cars or at their desks?
John had known a journalism student in college. Frank Smith. He had gotten an internship at the Clarion Call the summer previous and had said that being a reporter meant sitting at a desk and talking on the phone. Writing had nothing to do with it. The stories just glued themselves together from the talk and the editor took care of the rest. It was easy. He just cut out all the stuff that would get him fired or the paper shut down, called you into the office, killed a paragraph, and then it was time for print.
John closed up the front section, put it down on the bar, looked around, saw that he was the only one left, and then looked up at the television. The red car was in the lead. Lap two hundred twenty four. The crowd was still there in the stands, waiting for something new to happen. A crash, or a fire.
He looked at the paper again, saw the arts section under the handled front page, picked it up, and read the headline.
Charles Bukowski Dead at Seventy Four
He read the article. Leukemia. Six months of rot. He must have been shitting his intestines out towards the end. The services were to be conducted three days from now. John stood up from his stool, walked out the door and up to his room. He picked up the phone and called his friend from the newspaper.
Los Angeles County Hospital had high security. John paid the guard twenty dollars to make it as open as the library at noon on Tuesday.
“You came here to see a dead body huh?”
Smart guy, John thought.
“Yeah.”
“Well, for another hundred, I’ll get you right in and leave you there for an hour.”
“I’m looking for a particular one you know.” John said. The words easy. His calm was steady. It was a dream.
“Yeah. Most are. What’s the name, we’ll go in right now, there isn’t nobody there.”
They walked in the door and down a hall. It smelled like chemical death. No one ever wanted to say what the smell actually was when he or she commented on their dislike of hospital odor. The smell was simple. An obvious mystery. It was death. The smell of the approach and nestling comfort of it for a long time with different candidates.
“How much do they pay you for this gig?” John asked the security guard as they passed through another set of panel doors.
“I get about $8.50 an hour. Same as the guys at the airport. “
“How long have you been doing this?” he asked.
“Three years. It’s all right. Go nowhere gig. Guys like you make the scratch happen though. Everything’s about the side in this world you know that? The honest single dollar stream is gone man. Gone.”
They came to the door marked morgue, went into another one on the side, walked through a narrow passage, and came out in the morgue proper. The doors were steel and flat. There were bodies on stretchers. They were wrapped in plastic for the night.
“So what was the name?” the security guard asked.
John gave him the name.
The security guard walked around and found a chart. He studied it for a bit, put it down, looked at the wall, then at the ones on the stretchers, walked over to these, read a tag on a toe and said “Bingo.”
He pulled the plastic back from over the bodies face and motioned for John to come over.
“This is the one. Fuck, would you just look at this guy. That face. No swan, that’s for sure.”
John walked up to the body and looked at it. It was him. The man who worked at the post office for ten years. A woman in every city after every reading. The face in the photographs. The great dead writer. His. Him.
“I’d like a few moments alone please, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Okay, listen, if anyone comes in here, you don’t know nothing right?”
“Right.” John said.
“Okay. I’ll be waiting outside that door. How long do you think you need?”
“Well, I paid for the hour right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. That long huh? The whole hour?”
“Yeah, the whole hour.”
“Okay, okay. Cool. I’ll be outside okay?”
“Okay.”
The security guard walked to the door, opened it, walked out, and closed it behind him. John looked down at the body and rubbed his hand across the great dead writer’s thin wasted chest. The last agonies had been bad. You could see it. You could tell. The face was a sagging washcloth on the faucet. The edges of it were fuzzy. The eyes were closed. John reached his hand up to the face and pried one of the eyes open with his thumb and forefinger.
The eye looked up and nothing moved inside of it. It looked a little bit deflated. The surface had begun the wrinkle, and the iris was almost soup. The shards of his color had bled out at the edges. The corners were yellow.
John walked around the morgue and looked for what he would need. Nothing had worked, but this had to. It was all he had left. He couldn’t go back in time and beat him to it. Something else had supplied itself and John had latched onto it. Driving here had just happened. The security guard had just, well, happened. The walk in. The door closing. All those things had happened. And now this was going to happen and this was going to work.
John found a little saw, clean as shine, and a small scoop with sharp teeth edges. He found a tray, some gloves, a smock and a cup to fill with water in the sink. He arranged everything, looked at his watch, and saw that seven minutes had passed.
He thought about having a cigarette. He thought to himself that he should have asked the security guard if he could smoke in here, cursed the oversight, and lit up anyway.
He got the smock on, covered himself up, and took another drag from the cigarette he had leaned against the edge of a small preparation table.
He took the little saw and started at the top of the skull, right below the hairline. First just a flap of flesh curved off, and then he hit bone. He sawed through it. He got a quarter of the way through and the saw started to catch. Little bits of red fell off the teeth onto the plastic under the head. He pulled the saw up a little bit and started again, going slower, letting the saw do the work. He got to the base and then it came off, a curved plate with a mass of white hair hanging off the top. He picked it up and put it to the side.
John took the scoop and took out a piece of gray and pink brain. He held it up to his face, looked at it, opened his mouth, put the scoop in, and started chewing.
He stood there in the cold room of dead bodies over the one of the great dead writer and began to chow down. Swallowing every bite, some of it coming out the corners of his mouth.
“It’s working…” John said, “It’s really working…”
John chewed, swallowing and scooping, and finished what he started.
copyright 2004 robert jay lutener
