Charles Bukowski - Factotum

They let me try it. The metal strips resisted my efforts. They wouldn't budge. The sharp edges cut my hands as I worked. I began to bleed. For each poster you took out there was a new poster to replace it. Each one took forever. It was endless.

"There are green bugs all over New York," said one of the old guys after a while.

"There are?"

"Yeh. You new in New York?"

"Yes."

"Don't you know all New York people got these green bugs?"

"No."

"Yeh. Woman wanted to fuck me last night. I said, 'No, baby, nothing doing.'"

"Yeh?"

"Yeh. I told her I'd do it if she gave me five bucks. It takes five bucks worth of steak to replace that jizz."

"She give you the five bucks?"

"Nah. She offered me a can of Campbell 's mushroom soup."

We worked our way down to the end of the car. The two old men climbed off the back, began to walk toward the next subway car parked about fifty feet up the track. We were forty feet above the ground with nothing but railroad ties to walk on. I saw it wouldn't be any trouble at all for a body to slip through and fall to the ground below.

I climbed out of the subway car and slowly started stepping from tie to tie, can opener in one hand, cardboard posters in the other. A subway car filled with passengers pulled up; the lights from the train showed the way.

The train moved off; I was in total darkness. I could neither see the ties nor the spaces between them. I waited.

The two old guys hollered from the next car: "Come on! Hurry! We got a lot of work to do!"

"Wait! I can't see!"

"We ain't got all night!"

My eyes began to adjust. Step by step I went forward, slowly. When I reached the next car I put the posters on the floor and sat down. My legs were weak.

"What's the matter?"

"I don't know."

"What is it?"

"A man can get killed up here."

"Nobody's ever fallen through yet."

"I feel like I could."

"It's all in the mind."

"I know. How do I get out of here?"

"There's a stairway right over there. But you gotta cross a lotta tracks, you gotta watch for trains."

"Yes."

"And don't step on the third rail."

"What's that?"

"That's the power. It's the gold rail. It looks like gold. You'll see it."

I got down on the tracks and began stepping over them. The two old men watched me. The gold rail was there. I stepped very high over that.

Then I half-ran half-fell down the stairway. There was a bar across the street.

The hours at the dog biscuit factory were from 4:30 p.m. to 1 a.m.

I was given a dirty white apron and heavy canvas gloves. The gloves were burned and had holes in them. I could see my fingers peeking through. I was given instructions by a toothless elf with a film over his left eye; the film was white-and-green with spidery blue lines.

He had been on the job nineteen years.

I advanced to my post. A whistle blew and the machinery leaped into action. Dog biscuits began to move. The dough was stamped into shape and then placed on heavy metal screens with iron edges.

I grabbed a screen, placed it in the oven behind me. I turned. There was the next screen. There was no way to slow them down. The only time they stopped was when something snagged the machinery. It didn't happen often. When it did, the Elf got it going quickly.

The flames of the oven leaped fifteen feet high. The inside of the oven was like a ferris wheel. Each ledge held twelve screens. When the oven man (me) had filled a ledge he kicked a lever which turned the wheel one notch, bringing down the next empty ledge.

The screens were heavy. Lifting one screen could tire a man. If you thought about doing it for eight hours, lifting hundreds of screens, you'd never make it. Green biscuits, red biscuits, yellow biscuits, brown biscuits, purple biscuits, blue biscuits, vitamin biscuits, vegetable biscuits.

On such jobs men become tired. They experience a weariness beyond fatigue. They say mad, brilliant things. Out of my head, I cussed and talked and cracked jokes and sang. Hell boils with laughter. Even the Elf laughed at me.

I worked for several weeks. I came in drunk each night. It didn't matter; I had the job nobody wanted. After an hour at the oven I was sober. My hands were blistered and burned. Each day I sat aching in my room pricking my blisters with pins I first sterilized with matches.

One night I was drunker than usual. I refused to punch in. "This is it," I told them.

The Elf was in trauma. "How will we make it, Chinaski?"

"Ah."

"_Give us one more night!_"

I got his head in the crook of my arm, squeezed; his ears turned pink. "Little bastard," I said. Then I let him go.

After arriving in Philadelphia I found a rooming house and paid a week's rent in advance. The nearest bar was fifty years old. You could smell the odor of urine, shit and vomit of a half century as it came up through the floor into the bar from the restrooms below.

It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Two men were fighting in the center of the bar.

The guy to the right of me said his name was Danny. To the left, he said his name was Jim.

Danny had a cigarette in his mouth, end glowing. An empty beerbottle looped through the air. It missed his cigarette and nose, fractionally. He didn't move or look around, tapped the ashes of his cigarette into a tray. "That was pretty close, you son of a bitch! Come that close again, you got a fight on your hands!"

Every seat was taken. There were women in there, a few housewives, fat and a bit stupid, and two or three ladies who had fallen on hard times. As I sat there one girl got up and left with a man. She was back in five minutes.

"Helen! Helen! How do you do it?"

She laughed.

Another jumped up to try her. "That must be good. I gotta have some!"

They left together. Helen was back in five minutes.

"She must have a suction pump for a pussy!"

"I gotta try me some of that," said an old guy down at the end of the bar. "I haven't had a hard-on since Teddy Roosevelt took his last hill."

It took Helen ten minutes with that one.

"I want a sandwich," said a fat guy. "Who's gonna run me an errand for a sandwich?"

I told him I would. "Roast beef on a bun, everything on."

He gave me some money. "Keep the change."

I walked down to the sandwich place. An old geezer with a big belly walked up. "Roast beef on a bun to go, everything on. And a bottle of beer while I'm waiting."

I drank the beer, took the sandwich back to the fat guy in the bar, and found another seat. A shot of whiskey appeared. I drank it down. Another appeared. I drank it down. The juke box played.

A young fellow of about twenty-four came down from the end of the bar. "I need the venetian blinds cleaned," he said to me.

"You sure do."

"What do you do?"

"Nothing. Drink. Both."

"How about the blinds?"

"Five bucks."

"You're hired."

They called him Billy-Boy. Billy-Boy had married the owner of the bar. She was forty-five.

He brought me two buckets, some suds, rags and sponges. I took the blinds down, removed the slats, and began.

"Drinks are free," said Tommy the night bartender, "as long as you're working."

"Shot of whiskey, Tommy."

It was slow work; the dust had caked, turned into embedded grime. I cut my hands several times on the edges of the metal slats. The soapy water burned.

"Shot of whiskey, Tommy."

I finished one set of blinds and hung them up. The patrons of the bar turned to look at my work.

"Beautiful!"

"It sure helps the place."

"They'll probably raise the price of drinks."

"Shot of whiskey, Tommy," I said.

I took down another set of blinds, pulled out the slats. I beat Jim at the pinball machine for a quarter, then emptied the buckets in the crapper and got fresh water.