Bukowski no. 39

Would you trust a man without broken teeth
To teach you the way to eat an olive?

Autobiography no. 20

For some reason lost to time I had decided to not learn the tables’ numbers
and I gave them names instead.
I was bussing tables because I was qualified
and I was young enough then that the work didn’t numb my hands
or radiate pain from my wrists to my fingertips.

She was named after Octavian’s daughter (I am sure this was incidental)
and I was in love with her.
I am being very imprecise. I thought she had beautiful hair and she was nice to me.

One afternoon she arrived at work and instead of the normal artificiality that she clad herself in
she did not even fake a smile at me and there were the remnants of tears in her eyes
and I asked her what the matter was, though I am terrible at helping people who are upset.

She explained that her young daughter was sick, nothing serious, but that she wished
she could be at home with the child instead of slaving away underneath the lights and lies
that characterized our profession.

I had been drinking for most of the day, but sparingly, and as I walked around, cleaning tables
and making sure the placement of saltshakers was perfect, I watched her.
Goddamn did she know how to move around a room.

She made a lot more money than I did, because my work was easy.
She was good at her job and at smiling but after working with her for a year
I was conscious that I knew almost nothing about her and I preferred it that way.

As night drew closer upon us we had not been very busy
and she had  this table of teenagers that were only getting fifteen dollars worth of appetizers and taking up space
and the name of their table was Eurydice because the next table was named Orpheus
and just beyond Orpheus was the bar. I thought all of this was very clever when I named the tables in the first place.

I went to the back and thought about it a little and then drank some vodka out of an apple juice bottle and went onto the floor and waited for the teenagers to leave and I swooped in about fifteen seconds after they departed and crumpled up a twenty and tossed it on the ground and as she came up, sighing and saying “Ugh, at least they’re gone now, kids never tip.” I cleaned the table quickly and she took a couple of things but didn’t get in my way. She told me thank you and walked away from the table and I watched her walk away and I was glad that I watched her walk away. After a few lecherous moments I called her name and she turned around. I made a show of picking the bill up and tossing it in the wire basket on the table and I picked the basket up and handed it to her and she lit up like a Christmas tree.

I told myself I just wouldn’t go to the bar after work that day and that that would justify dropping the bill for a woman I barely knew and that made a hell of a lot more money than I did but after everyone was gone and I mopped the floors up and said “I’ll see you tomorrow morning boss” and clocked out, of course I went right to the bar anyway.

Bukowski no. 38

it is easy enough to ignore the occasional crawling sensation
that intermittently presents itself as a feature of having skin or madness,
but after finding one small tick meandering around your ankle
try and ignore it then
just try

Alba

The middle school had three major sections:
a central administrative area and library and cafeteria,
and two wings (composed of two long hallways)
one for sixth graders and one for fifth graders.
There was a small parking lot in front of the school for administrators or visitors
near the American flag and basketball hoops and four-square paint
and a larger parking lot behind the building for teachers and school buses.

The fifth grade wing was further south than that of the sixth grade
and both wings ran in L shapes
The grades were structured into five Teams each.
Teams 1 2 and 3 were in the north-south wing,
and teams 4 and 5 were in the wing that ran east to west.
I suppose the system made sense when they designed it
and in any case my community was always said to have Good Schools.
Only later in life did I learn that the phrase “Good Schools” was code
for not having any black or brown people
but this is not a story about racism.

The fourth team was mine I was on “5-4”
which is just what I’d say if anyone taller than me asked me what team I was on
and then they’d send me down the well-waxed tile hall to the section I belonged in.

As you walked up our hall the first door on the right was Mrs. P’s room and she was a hell of an old lady who taught us how to diagram sentences and if you ever didn’t want to do much work that day you could always just mention Bill Clinton’s name and settle back in your chair for her frothing condemnations of the man himself. We read Sounder that year and for my project I baked a cake from scratch “just like it would have been done back then” except I used electric egg beaters and the oven was electric too and my family didn’t make the flour ourselves or the butter or the baking soda but I did collect the eggs myself, big beautiful brown eggs still warm from one of the hundred birds that the 4-H Club gave my family in exchange for something weird like promising to pick the three best looking ones and show them at the county fair. I never knew how to cook and still don’t but I think the buttercream frosting was very tasty so maybe my mother made it or the cake but she might have made me make the cake.

As you walked past Mrs. P’s door you immediately found Mr. K’s door and he taught about history like it was for children but I suppose the others were children and he always had a bit of a short beard and I liked him and I think he liked me too because he would let me write essays on Thucydides instead of filling out front-and-back worksheets about why Andrew Jackson was an asshole, or maybe they were about the National Bank. I liked Mr. K a lot because he treated me like I was a person and he let me go to the Gifted and Talented room a lot when I was bored and I liked GT because they had this fun game where you simulated living on a resource scarce island and all you had to do to play the game practically all the time was to solve a bunch of easy logic puzzles and do algebra problems and or answer tests about marine biology because you had to do a certain amount of projects per hour. The thing I liked best in the game was fishing because you could build a shelter close to a source of food, water, and fuel, but it was sometimes fun to try to be a hunter instead. If you played long enough you could be rescued but if you beat the game you weren’t allowed to play it anymore... so my characters always decided life was hopeless after a certain amount of time and went off in the wilderness to starve because they never read Robinson Crusoe.

Several paces from Mr. K’s door was Mrs. Pa’s door and she taught mathematics and didn’t like when I read books in class even if they were by Descartes and she had rosy cheeks like she was sick or an alcoholic but she taught math well enough to satisfy the standards of America.

On the other side of the hall from the other three doors was Mrs. K’s door. She taught science and she was a member of the 4-H Club so I guess I kind of got the chickens from her.

In front of the school like I said there were four-square courts painted up and basketball goals and they had these long crossbars, long as a road is wide and two inches thick, one at the entrance to the asphalt recreational court and one at the exit, twenty-four-foot long beams that swung and fastened to thick black bars and they were painted yellow and they put them there so they could lock the place up and also keep us safe during recess just in case and when the bars were not locked they were difficult to move even for me and they did not sway much with the wind.

It was Sunday. February Second of 1997 was the day and I was ten years old, and I’ll never forget it, because Mrs. K was the nicest lady and I lamented once that I never got to have a birthday celebration in school because my birthday was in the summer before school started and I didn’t want to bother my mother because she had enough to worry about but Mrs. K said she would make some cupcakes on Wednesday for my half birthday. I told her that Wednesday was named for Odin and she frowned a little, in a way that she thought I would not see. She was a Baptist and didn’t like the ancient myths much or didn’t seem to but she never told me to not read The Edda in her class when I was bored. Of course I wasn’t at the school because it was a Sunday and we hadn’t had the conversation about the cupcakes on a Sunday but it was Sunday. The sun was passing through the sky as was its custom and it was in everyone’s eyes. Someone forgot to lock up the crossbar painted yellow as the long beams of the sun and she must have left church and went to school to make sure of something or get some extra work done and since the school was closed she was going into the front parking lot because it was closer to the building  and she drove her car right into the crossbar and it either cut her head off or basically cut her head off and the next day at school the counselors offered us soft drinks and they kept asking if we needed to talk and they took the crossbars down for a little while so that they were not straight like sunrays and instead they made them deeper, slatted with bars as if to prefigure a prison so that no one could Not See the bar again if it wasn’t locked up and I always wondered about the man who didn’t lock the bar because she left behind three children and she was kind and it cut her head clean off or could have and how could he sleep and what about the metalworkers who made the new crossguards were they just making money or did they know she was still dead her funeral was on my halfbirthday I don’t know who cleaned up the glass but it wasn’t there on Monday and before you knew it we had a new science teacher and Mrs. H was really really pretty but what did that matter? I did not know. I did not know if Mrs. K was pretty but everyone said it about our new teacher but I think that’s just what people say about women before they have something else nice to say. She taught the other children as much as any teacher would have and she never told me that I couldn’t read in class and when they put her name over the door it did not bother me too much because the classroom was hers.

If you were to drive by the school today the posts for tethering the metal barriers are closer to the public road than they were in my time. They are locked by the entrances far from where the children play after lunch or the visitors park their cars. They are still slatted now and not narrow to save money on metal.

She was a good woman and got her head cut off, or close enough.
She died quickly and alone on a cold day.

why was she even there on Sunday
why was she even a teacher her husband made money
why did they offer us soft drinks
why did they keep asking us to talk when there was nothing to say

I planted a white oak and I gave it her name
And it grew there for years on my family’s land
Then we didn’t have the money so we had to leave.

Three months back I drove by to show my love
The bayou and forests and place I grew up
But when we arrived I did not recognize a thing.

The strangers who live there now cut down the trees, every last one,
The three sweetgums near the road and the sassafras by the driveway
and the hundred pines that marked the edge of the goat field

They had painted the house a different color
And behind that new house you couldn’t see a thing
They had cut down it all
The giant black oak with the tire swing
The ancient elm that was half dead from lightning
The plum and all the hickory and all the sycamore and
All of it all of it all.

Many times my heart has been broken
But it can never again break as it did
There in a car sitting beside my love
Looking out at those twenty acres of desolation.

I had always daydreamed of somehow getting money
And buying the land back but now it is no longer there.

Your tree should have been twenty feet high by now
And it should have lived for two hundred years.
I am so sorry, Cindy. I will plant you another
As soon as I find a place where no one can cut it down.

Bukowski no. 37

I thought that her eyes were very lovely,
like the color of malachite before it was worn smooth with time or water.
We were sitting on a ragged leather couch
that might have been expensive once,
and she had done her eye makeup
in that dramatic variation of Cleopatra Philopator’s style
that had inexplicably been resurrected back into fashion,
and her shirt was tight on her shoulders and cleaved low beneath the neck
as is always in fashion.

I sat there barely making eye contact.
Although I had been invited I had no idea why I was there.
I guess she was looking for the same thing as anyone else.
I did not ask her what she or other people wanted.
She sloppily poured gin and it was sliding down her throat and her wrist
and she was talking about some cruel things that someone had said about her
and because her hand was on my knee
I realized that she expected me to listen to her
so I sat there and she said

“She said I was an alcoholic, and that I don’t have my shit together, and that I was a fucking whore, and that I was terrible at my job!”
-and then she went on and on but it was the same sort of complaint only at greater length  and I noticed that her carpet was very clean but that her baseboards were in a state of terrible disrepair perhaps brought on by the scratching of domestic animals, and then she stopped talking.

I looked at her and she looked at me unhappily so I shook my head slowly
and it seemed like she expected me to say something so I said
“I thought you made really good money at work”
which was probably the right thing to say
because five minutes later her mouth was on my cock.
I had a hell of a good time for a little while but of course then she went to sleep
and she did not have any books
and I was not tired so I started drinking the rest of the gin she’d left out
and after I found the unopened bottle of Beefeater under the bathroom sink
I drank that too.

An Anxiety

unable to do something so simple as drive
but the car needed to be driven
and I was preternaturally aware of the asphalt
and the lines that separated me from others
and then the first Mack truck drove past

and oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck keep the wheel straight don’t speed don’t go too fast around this corner you can’t have a panic attack right now you can’t throw up right now you can’t stop breathing right now you can’t slap yourself in the face right now you are moving fifty five miles per hour and this car weighs three thousand pounds you have to keep breathing Datta Dayadhvam Damyata Datta Datta Datta datta datta now you can stop the car now you can go vomit in the nearby dumpster now you can hit yourself now you can hold your breath now you can start breathing again datta. Datta. Datta. Thirty more minutes in the car to go home. Datta. Datta.

Now you can shake on the floor. Now you can take your clothes off and slap yourself in the face as hard as you need to until you stop crying because there is nothing left of you but the headache. Datta. Datta. Now you can try to cover your shift tonight. You will not get a raise this month but there is always September. Three seconds of breathing in, five seconds of breathing out. Don’t rock back and forth so much.

Of course after that I got very drunk so that I would not be so ashamed of myself.
Tomorrow I will pretend that this never happened and I will get in the car and go to work.

Autobiography no. 19

THOCK
THOCK
THOCK

Chips of Spanish oak jumped into my hair
and I wished for a pair of safety glasses.
I became too conscious that my shoes were no protection
from the blade of the axe that glinted silver in the afternoon light,
but I swung again because I was confident I could fell the tree safely
and my form was well practiced and calculated to cause no injury
and anyway my love wanted a more clear view from the kitchen window
that the limbless leafless creature was unconscionably obstructing.
Suddenly as I prepared to swing again a wraith appeared at the corner of my vision
and I slowed my hand as the damn white dog jumped up at me and licked at my heels.

Before I began I had imprisoned her on the deck, poorly,
and so she escaped and nearly killed herself
on the back end of a swinging four pound hunk of metal.
I would have put her inside the house but she’s so goddamn dirty from the rains
and I would have chained her up outside but I don’t have a chain or a leash long enough
and now that I am inside drinking a beer
I am not sure I wanted to cut that tree down today.

After She Fell Asleep

I grabbed a couple beers (light, domestic, cheap for whoever paid for them)
from her mini-fridge.
I had made my mind up to run an edit on this piece I scribbled
down onto napkins a few months ago,
when I was still sleeping on the floor
and she was sleeping on it too
just because it was the floor I was sleeping on
and not because she was trying to become the Buddha.

I suppose if I took long enough tonight, I could recreate the spirit of that lost piece,
but it was in prose. It did not tell the truth. It only reported what had happened,
sedate as a newspaper headline and as full of lies.
I can recall a fact from when I was aged five
but I can scarcely remember the myriad deceptions of yesteryear
of which I am heir or author.

I consider for a moment going to find it-
I do not mean the paper.

I
Could
wake her from her comfortable sleep
and drag her to this carpeted floor
where I anxiously tap my foot until the cat hits my foot for being interesting
and kick the cat out of the room and lay with her

And afterward she
Could
look over at a bookshelf and say
“What is that?”
pointing at a serrated wire long as a garrote,
with hoops at the ends for you to put
Your fingers or lengths of wood into, depending on what size branch
You need to fell to its mother, Earth.

It would rest on a shelf in front of a few minor works of Marquez,
a few feet from where a man would lay his head in this room,
if a man slept in this room.
I reply,
“It is called a fingersaw”

And she would suddenly become embarrassed
at the scant light cast upon her wrists her shoulders her breasts her collarbones,
though just minutes before she was a goddess come again to the world,
and pull a sheet up to her neck as though she were not so beautiful and rare
that her very existence caused jealousy in flower petals and cold-clear alpine streams.

She would ask,
“Why do you have a fingersaw?”

And I would laugh and laugh,
My sweat and her sweat snaking in slow trails down my naked body,
As I square my shoulders and smile down at her
And reply
“Why do you think?”