Charles Bukowski - Women

It's like making a rosebud open, I thought. This has meaning. This is good. It's like two insects in a garden moving slowly towards each other. The male works his slow magic. The female slowly opens. I like it, I like it. Two bugs. Mindy is opening, she is getting wet. She is beautiful. Then I mounted her. I slid it in, my mouth on hers.

We drank all day and that night I tried again to make love to Mindy. I was astounded and dismayed to find she had a large pussy. An extra large pussy. I hadn't noticed it the night before. That was a tragedy. Woman's greatest sin. I worked and I worked. Mindy lay there as if she was enjoying it. I hoped to god she was. I began to sweat. My back ached. I was dizzy, sick. Her pussy seemed to get larger. I couldn't feel anything. It was like trying to fuck a large, loose paper bag. I was just barely touching the sides of her cunt. It was agony, it was relentless work without a reward. I felt damned. I didn't want to hurt her feelings. I desperately wanted to come. It wasn't just the drinking. I performed better than most when drinking. I heard my heart. I felt my heart. I felt it in my chest. I felt it in my throat. I felt it in my head. I couldn't bear it. I rolled off with a gasp.

"Sorry, Mindy, Jesus Christ, I'm sorry."

"It's all right, Hank," she said.

I rolled over on my stomach. I stank with sweat. I got up and poured two drinks. We sat upright in bed and drank the drinks, side by side. I couldn't understand how I had managed to come the first time. We had a problem. All that beauty, all that gentleness, all that goodness, and we had a problem. I was unable to tell Mindy what it was. I didn't know how to tell her she had a big cunt. Maybe nobody had ever told her.

"It will be better when I'm not drinking so much," I told her.

"Please don't worry, Hank."

"O.K."

We went to sleep or we pretended to go to sleep. Finally I did…

Mindy stayed about a week. I introduced her to my friends. We went places. But nothing was resolved. I couldn't climax. She didn't seem to mind. It was strange.

Around 10:45 PM one evening Mindy was drinking in the front room and reading a magazine. I was lying on the bed in just my shorts, drunk, smoking, a drink on the chair. I was staring at the blue ceiling, not feeling or thinking about anything.

There was a knock on the front door.

Mindy said, "Should I get it?"

"Sure," I said, "go ahead."

I heard Mindy open the door. Then I heard Lydia 's voice.

"I just came over to check out my competition."

Oh, I thought, this is nice. I'll get up and pour them both a drink, we'll all drink together and talk. I like my women to understand each other.

Then I heard Lydia say: "You're acute little thing, aren't you?"

Then I heard Mindy scream. And Lydia screamed. I heard scuffling, grunts, bodies flying. Furniture was upset. Mindy screamed again-the scream of one being attacked. Lydia screamed-the tigress at the kill. I leaped out of bed. I was going to separate them. I ran into the front room in my shorts. It was a hair-pulling, spitting, scratching, mad scene. I ran over to pull them apart. I stumbled over one of my shoes on the rug, fell heavily. Mindy ran out the door with Lydia right behind. They ran down the walk toward the street. I heard another scream.

Several minutes passed. I got up and closed the door. Evidently Mindy had gotten away because suddenly Lydia walked in. She sat down in a chair near the door. She looked at me.

"I'm sorry. I've pissed myself."

It was true. There was a dark stain in her crotch and one pant leg was soaked.

"It's all right," I said.

I poured Lydia a drink and she sat there holding it in her hand. I couldn't hold my drink in my hand. No one spoke. A short time later there was a knock on the door. I got up in my shorts and opened it. My huge, white, flabby belly hung out over the top of the shorts. Two policemen stood at the door.

"Hello," I said.

"We're answering a disturbance of the peace call."

"Just a little family argument," I said.

"We've got some details," said the cop standing closest to me. "There are two women."

"There usually are," I said.

"All right," said the first cop. "I just want to ask you one question."

"O.K."

"Which of the two women do you want?"

"I'll take that one." I pointed to Lydia sitting in the chair, all pissed over herself.

"All right, sir, are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

The cops walked off and there I was with Lydia again.

The phone rang the next morning. Lydia had gone back to her place. It was Bobby, the kid who lived in the next block and worked in the porno bookstore. "Mindy's down here. She wants you to come and talk to her."

"All right."

I walked over with 3 bottles of beer. Mindy was dressed in high heels and a black see-through outfit from Frederick 's. It resembled a doll's dress and you could see her black panties. There was no brassiere. Valerie wasn't around. I sat down and twisted the beer caps off, passed the bottles.

"Are you going back to Lydia, Hank?" Mindy asked.

"Sorry, yes. I'm back."

"That was rotten, what happened. I thought you and Lydia were finished?"

"I thought we were. Those things are very strange."

"All my clothes are down at your place. I'll have to come get them."

"Of course."

"Are you sure she's gone?"

"Yes."

"She acts like a bull, that woman, she acts like a dyke."

"I don't think she is."

Mindy got up to go to the bathroom. Bobby looked at me. "I fucked her," he said. "Don't blame her. She had no other place to go."

"I don't blame her."

"Valerie took her to Frederick 's to cheer her up. Got her a new outfit."

Mindy came out of the bathroom. She'd been crying.

"Mindy," I said, "I've got to go."

"I'll be down later for my clothes."

I got up and walked out the door. Mindy followed me out there. "Hold me," she said.

I held her. She was crying.

"You're never going to forget me… never!"

I walked back to my place thinking, I wonder if Bobby fucked Mindy? Bobby and Valerie were into lots of strange new things. I didn't care for their lack of common feeling. It was the way they did everything without any show of emotion. The same way another person might yawn or boil a potato.

To pacify Lydia I agreed to go to Muleshead, Utah. Her sister was camping in the mountains. The sisters actually owned much of the land. It had been inherited from their father. Glendoline, one of the sisters, had a tent pitched in the woods. She was writing a novel, The Wild Woman of the Mountains. The other sisters were to arrive any day. Lydia and I arrived first. We had a pup tent. We squeezed in there the first night and the mosquitoes squeezed in with us. It was terrible.

The next morning we sat around the campfire. Glendoline and Lydia cooked breakfast. I had purchased $40 worth of groceries which included several 6-packs of beer. I had them cooling in a mountain spring. We finished breakfast. I helped with the dishes and then Glendoline brought out her novel and read to us. It wasn't really bad, but it was very unprofessional and needed a lot of polishing. Glendoline presumed that the reader was as fascinated by her life as she was-which was a deadly mistake. The other deadly mistakes she had made were too numerous to mention.

I walked to the spring and came back with 3 bottles of beer. The girls said no, they didn't want any. They were very anti-beer. We discussed Glendoline's novel. I figured that anybody who would read their novel aloud to others had to be suspect. If that wasn't the old kiss of death, nothing was.

The conversation shifted and the girls started chatting about men, parties, dancing, and sex. Glendoline had a high, excited voice, and laughed nervously, laughed constantly. She was in her mid-forties, quite fat and very sloppy. Besides that, just like me, she was simply ugly.