Charles Bukowski - The Captain Is Out to Lunch

I believe that I worked too long in my life as a common laborer. I worked as such until I was 50 years old. Those bastards got me used to going somewhere every day and staying somewhere for many hours and then returning. I feel guilty just lolling about. So, I find myself at the track, bored and, at the same time, going crazy. I reserve the nights for the computer or for drinking or for both. Some of my readers think I love horses, that the action excites me, that I am a gung-ho gambler, a real macho big time boy. I get books in the mail about horses and horse racing and stories about the track and etc. I don't give a damn about that stuff. I go to the track almost reluctantly. I am too idiotic to figure out any other place to go. Where, where during the day? The Hanging Gardens? A motion picture? Hell, help me, I can't sit around with the ladies and most men my age are dead and if they aren't dead they should be because they surely seem to be.

I've tried staying away from the track but thein I get very nervous and depressed and that night there are absolutely no juices to lend the computer. I guess getting my ass out of here forces me to look at Humanity and when you look at Humanity you've GOT to react. It's all too much, a continuous horror show. Yeah, I'm bored out there, I'm terrorized out there but I'm also, so far, some kind of student. A student of hell.

Who knows? Some day soon I might be bedridden. I'll lay there and paint on sheets of paper tacked to the wall. I'll paint them with a long brush and probably even like it.

But right now, it's the faces of the horseplayers, cardboard faces, horrible, evil, blank, greedy, dying faces, day papers, watching the changes on the toteboard as they are being ground away to lett and less, as I stand there with them, as I am one with them. We are sick, the suckerfish of hope. Our poor clothing, our old cars. We move toward the mirage, our lives wasted like everyboy else's.

Stayed home from the track today, have had a sore throat and a pain at the top of my head, a tittle toward the right side of it. When you get to be 71 you can never tell when your head is going to explode through the windshield. I still go after a good drunk now and then and smoke far too many cigarettes. The body get pissed off at me for doing this, but the mind must be fed too. And the spirit. Drinking feeds my mind and my spirit. Anyhow, I stayed in from the track, slept until 12:20 p.m.

Easy day. Got in the spa like a big timer. The sun was out and the water bubbled and whirled, hot. I soothed out. Why not? Get an edge. Try to feel better. The whole world is a sack of shit ripping open. I can't save it. But I've gotten many letters from people who claim that my writing has saved their asses. But I didn't write it for that, I wrote it to save my own ass. I was always outside, never fit. I found that out in the schoolyards. And another thing I learned was that I learned very slowly. The other guys knew everything, I didn't know a fucking thing. Everything was bathed in a white and dizzying light. I was a fool. And yet, even when I was a fool I knew that I wasn't a complete fool. I had some little corner of me that I was protecting , there was something there. No matter. Here I was in a spa and my life was closing down. I didn't mind, I had seen the circus. Still, there are always more things to write until they throw me into the darkness or into whatever it is. That's the good thing about the word, it just keeps trotting on, looking for things, forming sentences, having a ball. I was full of words and they still came out in a good form. I was lucky. In the spa. Bad throat, pain in head, I was luck. Old writer in spa, musing. Nice, nice. But hell is always there, waiting to unfurl.

My old yellow cat came up and looked at me in the water. We looked at each other. We each knew everything and nothing. Then he walked off.

The day went on. Linda and I had lunch somewhere, don't remember where. Food not so good, packed with Saturday people. They were alive but they weren't alive. Sitting at the tables and booths, eating and talking. Wait, Jesus, that reminds me. Had lunch the other day before going to the track. Sat at the counter, it was completely empty. I had gotten my order and was eating. Man walked in and took the seat RIGHT NEXT TO MINE. Threre were 20 or 25 other seats. He took the one next to me. I'm just not that fond of people. The further I am from them the better I feel. And he put in his order and started talking into the waitress. About professional football. I watch it sometimes myself, but to talk about it in a cafe? They went on and on, dribbles about this and that. On and on. Favorite player. Who should win, etc. Then somebody at a booth joined in. I suppose I wouldn't have minded it all so much if I hadn't been rubbing elbows with that bastard next to me. A good sort, sure. He liked football. Safe. American. Sitting next to me. Forget it.

So yes, we had lunch, Linda and I, got back and it went restfully toward the night, then just after dark Linda noticed something. She was good at that sort of thing. I saw her coming back through the yard and she said, „Old Charley fell, the fire department is there.“ Old Charley is the 96-year-old guy who lives in the big house next door to us. His wife died last week. They were married 46 years.

I walked out front and there was the fire truck. There was a fellow standing there. „I'm Charley's neighbor. Is the alive?“ „Yes,“ he said.

It was evident that they were waiting for the ambulance. The fire truck had gotten there first. Linda and I waited. The ambulance came. It was odd. Two little guys got out, they seemed quite small. They stood side by side. Three fire engine guys surrounded them. One of them started talking to the little guys. They stood there and nodded. Then that was over. They walked around and got the stretcher. They carried it up the long stairway to the house.

They were in there a very long time. Then out they came. Old Charley was strapped onto the stretcher. As they got ready to load him into the amulance we stepped forward. „Hold on, Charley,“ I said. „We'll be waiting for you to come back,“ Linda said.

„Who are you?“ Charley asked.

„We're your neighbors,“ Linda answered. Then he was loaded in and gone. A red car followed with 2 relatives in it.

My neighbor walked over from across the street. We shook hands. We'd been a couple of drunks together. We told him about Charley. And we were all miffed that the relatives left alone so much. But there wasn't much we could do.

„You oughta see my waterfall,“ said my neighbor.

„All right,“ I said, „let's see it.“ We walked over there, through his wife, past his kind and out the back door and into the backyard past his pool and sure enough there in the back was a HUGE waterfall. It went all the way up a cliff in the back and some of the water seemed to be coming out of a tree trunk. It was massive. And built of huge and beautiful stones of different color. The water roared down flooded by lights. It was had to believe. There was a worker back there still working on the waterfall. There was more to be done on it.

Well, my 71st year has been a hell of a productive year. I have probably written more words this year than in any year of my life. And though a writer is a poor judge of his own work, I still tend to believe that the writing is about as good as ever – I mean, as good as I have done in my peak times. This computer that I started using on Jan. 18 has had much to do with it. It's simply easier to get the word down, it transfers more quickly from the brain (or wherever this comes from) to the fingers and from the fingers to the screen where it is immediately visible – crisp and clear. It's not a matter of speed per se, it's a matter of flow, a river of words and if the words are good then let them run with ease. No more carbons, no more retyping. I used to neeed one night to do the work and then the next night to correct the errors and sloppines of the night before. Misspellings, screw-ups in tenses, etc. can now all be corrected on the orginal copy without a complete retype or write-ins or cross-outs. Nobody likes to read haphazard copy, not even the writer. I know all this must sound prissy and over-careful but it isn't, all it does is allow whatever force or luck you might have engendered to come out clearly. It's all for the best, really, and if this is how you lose your soul, I am all for it.