Charles Bukowski - Ham On Rye

I heard him get down the razor strop. My right leg still ached. It didn't help, having felt the strop many times before. The whole world was out there indifferent to it all, but that didn't help. Millions of people were out there, dogs and cats and gophers, buildings, streets, but it didn't matter. There was only father and the razor strop and the bathroom and me. He used that strop to sharpen his razor, and early in the mornings I used to hate him with his face white with lather, standing before the mirror shaving himself. Then the first blow of the strop hit me. The sound of the strop was flat and loud, the sound itself was almost as bad as the pain. The strop landed again. It was as if my father was a machine, swinging that strop. There was the feeling of being in a tomb. The strop landed again and I thought, that is surely the last one. But it wasn't. It landed again. I didn't hate him. He was just unbelievable, I just wanted to get away from him. I couldn't cry. I was too sick to cry, too confused. The strop landed once again. Then he stopped. I stood and waited. I heard him hanging up the strop.

"Next time," he said, "I don't want to find any hairs."

I heard him walk out of the bathroom. He closed the bathroom door. The walls were beautiful, the bathtub was beautiful, the wash basin and the shower curtain were beautiful, and even the toilet was beautiful. My father was gone.

Of all the guys left in the neighborhood, Frank was the nicest. We got to be friends, we got to going around together, we didn't need the other guys much. They had more or less kicked Frank out of the group, anyway, so he became friends with me. He wasn't like David, who had walked home from school with me. Frank had a lot more going for him than David had. I even joined the Catholic church because Frank went there. My parents liked me going to church. The Sunday masses were very boring. And we had to go to Catechism classes. We had to study the Catechism book. It was just boring questions and answers.

One afternoon we were sitting on my front porch and I was reading the Catechism out loud to Frank. I read the line, "God has bodily eyes and sees all things."

"Bodily eyes?" Frank asked.

"Yes."

"You mean like this?" he asked.

He clenched his hands into fists and placed them over his eyes.

"He has milk bottles for eyes," Frank said, pushing his fists against his eyes and turning toward me. Then he began laughing. I began laughing too. We laughed a long time. Then Frank stopped.

"You think He heard us?"

"I guess so. If He can see everything He can probably hear everything too."

"I'm scared," said Frank. "He might kill us. Do you think He'll kill us?"

"I don't know."

"We better sit here and wait. Don't move. Sit still."

We sat on the steps and waited. We waited a long time.

"Maybe He isn't going to do it now," I said.

"He's going to take His time," said Frank. We waited another hour, then we walked down to Frank's place. He was building a model airplane and I wanted to take a look at it…

The afternoon came when we decided to go to our first confession. We walked to the church. We knew one of the priests, the main man. We had met him in an ice cream parlor and he had spoken to us. We had even gone to his house once. He lived in a place next to the church with an old woman. We stayed quite a while and asked all sorts of questions about God. Like, how tall was He? And did He just sit in a chair all day? And did He go to the bathroom like everybody else? The priest never did answer our questions directly but still he seemed like a nice guy, he had a nice smile.

We walked to the church thinking about confession, thinking about what it would be like. As we got near the church a stray dog began walking along with us. He looked very thin and hungry. We stopped and petted him, scratched his back.

"It's too bad dogs can't go to heaven," said Frank.

"Why can't they?"

"You gotta be baptized to go to heaven."

"We ought to baptize him."

"Think we should?"

"He deserves a chance to go to heaven."

I picked him up and we walked into the church. We took him to the bowl of holy water and I held him there as Frank sprinkled the water on his forehead.

"I hereby baptize you," said Frank.

We took him outside and put him back on the sidewalk again.

"He even looks different," I said.

The dog lost interest and walked off down the sidewalk. We went back into the church, stopping first at the holy water, dipping our fingers into it and making the sign of the cross. We both kneeled at a pew near the confessional booth and waited. A fat woman came out from behind the curtain. She had body odor. I could smell her strong odor as she walked past. Her smell was mixed with the smell of the church, which smelled like piss. Every Sunday people came to mass and smelled that piss-smell and nobody said anything. I was going to tell the priest about it but I couldn't. Maybe it was the candles.

"I'm going in," said Frank.

Then he got up, walked behind the curtain and was gone. He was in there a long time. When he came out he was grinning.

"It was great, just great! You go in there now!"

I got up, pulled the curtain back and walked in. It was dark. I kneeled down. All I could see in front of me was a screen. Frank said God was back in there. I kneeled and tried to think of something bad that I had done, but I couldn't think of anything. I just knelt there and tried and tried to think of something but I couldn't. I didn't know what to do.

"Go ahead," said a voice. "Say something!"

The voice sounded angry. I didn't think there would be any voice. I thought God had plenty of time. I was frightened. I decided to lie.

"All right," I said. "I… kicked my father. I… cursed my mother… I stole money from my mother's purse. I spent it on candy bars. I let the air out of Chuck's football. I looked up a little girl's dress. I kicked my mother. I ate some of my snot. That's about all. Except today I baptized a dog."

" You baptized a dog?"

I was finished. A Mortal Sin. No use going on. I got up to leave. I didn't know if the voice recommended my saying some Hail Marys or if the voice didn't say anything at all. I pulled the curtain back and there was Frank waiting. We walked out of the church and were back on the street.

"I feel cleansed," said Frank, "don't you?"

"No."

I never went to confession again. It was worse than ten o'clock mass.

Frank liked airplanes. He lent me all his pulp magazines about World War 1. The best was Flying Aces. The dog-fights were great, the Spads and the Fokkers mixing it. I read all the stories. I didn't like the way the Germans always lost but outside of that it was great.

I liked going over to Frank's place to borrow and return the magazines. His mother wore high heels and had great legs. She sat in a chair with her legs crossed and her skirt pulled high. And Frank's father sat in another chair. His mother and father were always drinking. His father had been a flyer in World War I and had crashed. He had a wire running down inside one of his arms instead of a bone. He got a pension. But he was all right. When we came in he always talked to us.

"How are you doing, boys? How's it going?"

Then we found out about the air show. It was going to be a big one. Frank got hold of a map and we decided to get there by hitch-hiking. I thought we'd probably never make it to the air show but Frank said we would. His father gave us the money.

We went down to the boulevard with our map and we got a ride right away. It was an old guy and his lips were very wet, he kept licking his lips with his tongue and he had on an old checkered shirt which he had buttoned to the throat. He wasn't wearing a necktie. He had strange eyebrows which curled down into his eyes.