Charles Bukowski - Post Office

“Hello?”

There was a young guy out there with long blonde hair hanging down around his face and a black girl who just kept smiling as if she were crazy.

“Hank?”

“Yeh. Who you 2 guys?”

“She is a woman. Don’t you remember us? From the party? We brought a flower.”

“Oh balls, come on in.” They brought in the flower, some kind of red-orange thing on a green stem. It made a lot more sense than many things, except that it had been murdered. I found a bowl, put the flower in, brought out a jug of wine and put it on the coffeetable.

“You don’t remember her?” the kid asked. “You said you wanted to fuck her.”

She laughed.

“Very nice, but not now.”

“Chinaski, how are you going to make it without the post office?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll fuck you. Or let you fuck me. Hell, I don’t know.”

“You can sleep on our floor anytime.”

“Can I watch while you fuck?”

“Sure.”

We drank. I had forgotten their names. I showed them the heart. I asked them to take the horrible thing with them. I didn’t dare throw it out in case the pre-med student needed it back for an exam or at the expiration of the med-library loan or whatever.

So we went down and saw a nude floor show, drinking and hollering and laughing. I don’t know who had the money but I think he had most of it, which was nice for a change, and I kept laughing and squeezing the girl’s ass and her thighs and kissing her, but nobody cared. As long as the money lasted, you lasted.

They drove me back and he left with her. I got into the door, said goodbye, turned on the radio, found a half-pint of scotch, drank that, laughing, feeling good, finally relaxed, free, burning my fingers with short cigar butts, then made it to the bed, made it to the edge, tripped, fell down, fell down across the mattress, slept, slept, slept…

In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.

A major contemporary American writer, Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, in 1920, and brought to the United States when he was two. He was raised in Los Angeles where he continues to live. He began writing in his early twenties, published his first poems at the age of thirty-five, and has now published more than fifteen books of poetry and prose. Sartre and Genet have called him “the best poet in America.” Hundreds of his poems and stories have appeared in magazines and newspapers. Post Office is his first published novel.

Photo: Sam Cherry

© 1971 by Charles Bukowski

Black Sparrow Press

P. O. Box 3993

Santa Barbara, CA 93105

ISBN 0-87685-086-7 (paper) ISBN 0-87685-087-5 (cloth)

Several of these chapters appeared as short stories in Knight , Adam and Nola Express .