Post Office

by Charles Bukowski

I didn’t feel any different. But I knew that soon, like a man lifted quickly out of the deep sea, I would be afflicted—with a particular type of bends. I was like Joyce’s damned parakeets. After living in the cage I had taken the opening and flown out—like a shot into the heavens. Heavens?

I WENT INTO the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo. Ice cream bars, chimpanzees, tigers, green and red birds, and the sun coming down on top of her head, the sun coming down and crawling into the hairs of your arms, easy, old boy.

I’d pick up a bottle and swallow a hellish mixture of beer and ashes.

IN THE morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.