Charles Bukowski - Factotum

"It sounds good."

"You and I can use that machine. It makes a lot of noise but as long as we don't use it after 10 p.m. it's O.K."

"Who gets on top?"

"What difference does it make? I can take it or give it. Top or bottom, it doesn't matter."

"Doesn't it?"

"Hell no. We'll flip for it."

"Let me think it over."

"All right. Want another pill?"

"Yeah. Give me another yellow."

"I'll check with you at closing time."

"Sure."

Paul was there at closing.

"Well?"

"I can't do it, Paul. I'm straight."

"It's a great machine. Once you get on that machine you'll forget everything."

"I can't do it."

"Well, come on over and look at my pills anyhow."

"All right. I can do that."

I locked the back door. Then we walked out the front together. Mary Lou was sitting in the office smoking a cigarette and talking to Bud.

"Good night, men," said Bud with a big grin on his face…

Paul's place was a block off to the south. He had a lower front apartment with the windows facing Seventh Street.

"There's the machine," he said. He turned it on.

"Look at it, look at it. It sounds like a washing machine. The woman upstairs, she sees me in the hall and she says, 'Paul you must really be a clean guy. I hear you washing your clothes three or four times a week.'"

"Turn it off," I said.

"Look at my pills. I've got thousands of pills, thousands. I don't even know what some of them are."

Paul had all the bottles on the coffee table. There were eleven or twelve bottles, all different sizes and shapes and filled with colored pills. They were beautiful. As I watched he opened a bottle and took three or four pills out of it and swallowed them. Then he opened another bottle and took a couple of pills. Then he opened a third bottle.

"Come on, what the hell," he said. "let's get on the machine."

"I'll take a rain check. I got to go."

"All right," he said, "if you won't fuck me, I'll fuck myself!"

I closed the door behind me and walked out on the street. I heard him turn on the machine.

Mr. Manders walked back to where I was working and stood and looked at me. I was packing a large order of paints and he stood there watching me. Manders had been the original owner of the store but his wife had run off with a black man and he had started drinking. He drank his way out of the ownership. Now he was just a salesman and another man owned his store.

"You putting FRAGILE labels on these cartons?"

"Yes."

"Do you pack them well? Plenty of newspaper and straw?"

"I think I'm doing it right."

"Do you have enough FRAGILE labels?"

"Yes, there's a whole boxfull under the bench here."

"Are you sure you know what you're doing? You don't look like a shipping clerk."

"What does a shipping clerk look like?"

"They wear aprons. You don't wear an apron."

"Oh."

"Smith-Barnsley called to say that they had received a broken pint jar of rubber cement in a shipment."

I didn't answer.

"You let me know if you run out of FRAGILE labels."

"Sure."

Manders walked off down the aisle. Then he stopped and turned and watched me. I ripped some tape off the dispenser and with an extra flourish I wrapped it around the carton. Manders turned and walked away.

Bud came running back. "How many six-foot squeegies you got in stock?"

"None."

"This guy wants five six-foot squeegies now. He's waiting for them. Make them up."

Bud ran off. A squeegie is a piece of board with a rubber edge. It's used in silk-screening. I went to the attic, got the lumber down, measured off five six-foot sections, and sawed the boards. Then I began drilling holes into the wood along one edge. You bolted the rubber into place after drilling the holes. Then you had to sand the rubber down until it was level, a perfectly straight edge. If the rubber edge wasn't perfectly straight, the silk-screen process wouldn't work. And the rubber had a way of curling and warping and resisting.

Bud was back in three minutes. "You got those squeegies ready yet?"

"No."

He ran back to the front. I drilled, turned screws, sanded. In five more minutes he was back. "You got those squeegies ready yet?"

"No."

He ran off.

I had one six-foot squeegie finished and was halfway through another when he came back again.

"Never mind. He left."

Bud walked back up toward the front…

The store was going broke: Each day the orders were smaller and smaller. There was less and less to do. They fired Picasso's buddy and had me mop the crappers, empty the baskets, hang the toilet paper. Each morning I swept and watered the sidewalk in front of the store. Once a week I washed the windows.

One day I decided to clean up my own quarters. One of the things I did was to clean out the carton area where I kept all the empty cartons I used for shipping. I got them all out of there and swept up the trash. As I was cleaning up I noticed a small oblong gray box at the bottom of the bin. I picked it up and opened it. It contained twenty-four large-sized camel hair brushes. They were fat and beautiful and sold for $10 each. I didn't know what to do. I looked at them for some time, then closed the lid, walked out the back and put them in a trashcan in the alley. Then I put all the empty cartons back in the bin.

That night I left as late as possible. I walked to the nearby cafe and had a coffee and apple pie. Then I came out, walked down the block, and turned up the alley. I walked up the alley and was a quarter of the way when I saw Bud and Mary Lou enter the alley from the other end. There was nothing to do but to keep walking. It was final. We got closer and closer. Finally as I passed them I said, "Hi." They said, "Hi." I kept walking. I walked out the other end of the alley and across the street and into a bar. I sat down. I sat there and had a beer and then had another. A woman down the bar asked me if I had a match. I got up and lighted her cigarette; as I did that, she farted. I asked her if she lived in the neighborhood. She said she was from Montana. I remembered an unhappy night I'd had in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which is near Montana. Finally I left and walked back to the alley.

I went up to the trashcan and reached in. It was still there: the oblong gray box. It didn't feel empty. I slipped it through the neck of my shirt and it dropped down, slipped down, slid down against my gut and lay there. I walked back to where I lived.

The next thing that happened was that they hired a Japanese girl. I had always had a very strange idea, for a long time, that after all the trouble and pain was over, that a Japanese girl would come along one day and we would live happily ever after. Not so much happily, as _easily_ and with deep understanding and mutual concern. Japanese women had a beautiful bone structure. The shape of the skull, and the tightening of the skin with age, was a lovely thing; the skin of the drum drawn taut. With American women the face got looser and looser and finally fell apart. Even their bottoms fell apart and became indecent. The strength of the two cultures was very different too: Japanese women instinctively understood yesterday and today and tomorrow. Call it wisdom. And they had staying power. American women only knew today and tended to come to pieces when just one day went wrong.

So I was very taken with the new girl. Also I was still drinking heavily with Jan which befuddled the brain, gave it a strange airy feeling, made it take strange twists and turns, gave it courage. So the first day she came back with the orders I said, "Hey, let's touch. I want to kiss you."

"What?"

"You heard me."

She walked away. As she did I noticed she had a slight limp. It figured: the pain and the weight of centuries…