Ham on Rye

by Charles Bukowski

So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools.

Nobody would change position. We were the way we were, and we didn’t want to be anything else. We all came from Depression families and most of us were ill-fed, yet we had grown up to be huge and strong. Most of us, I think, got little love from our families, and we didn’t ask for love or kindness from anybody. We were a joke but people were careful not to laugh in front of us. It was as if we had grown up too soon and we were bored with being children. We had no respect for our elders. We were like tigers with the mange.

I don’t know what it was about us but we had something, and we felt it. You could see it in the way we walked and talked. We didn’t talk much, we just inferred, and that’s what got everybody mad, the way we took things for granted.

I liked being bad. Trying to be good made me sick.

I had decided against religion a couple of years back. If it were true, it made fools out of people, or it drew fools. And if it weren’t true, the fools were all the more foolish.

I just wished that she would enfold me in her starched whiteness and that together we could vanish forever from the world.

It didn’t pay to trust another human being. Humans didn’t have it, whatever it took.

Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

I didn’t say any more because when you hate, you don’t beg …

It never occurred to her that maybe the books were wrong. Or that maybe it didn’t matter.

Gathered around me were the weak instead of the strong, the ugly instead of the beautiful, the losers instead of the winners. It looked like it was my destiny to travel in their company through life. That didn’t bother me so much as the fact that I seemed irresistible to these dull idiot fellows. I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired. I wanted to live alone, I felt best being alone, cleaner, yet I was not clever enough to rid myself of them. Maybe they were my masters: fathers in another form.

The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned

nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

Everybody had to conform, find a mold to fit into. Doctor, lawyer, soldier—it didn’t matter what it was. Once in the mold you had to push forward. Sussex was as helpless as the next man. Either you managed to do something or you starved in the streets.

“I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”

As far as I could rationalize, I had nothing to protect. Also, having been born in Germany, there was a natural loyalty and I didn’t like to see the whole German nation, the people, depicted everywhere as monsters and idiots.

Dying in a war never stopped wars from happening.

The life of the sane, average man was dull, worse than death. There seemed to be no possible alternative. Education also seemed to be a trap. The little education I had allowed myself had made me more suspicious. What were doctors, lawyers, scientists? They were just men who allowed themselves to be deprived of their freedom to think and act as individuals. I went back to my shack and drank …

I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.