Ham on Rye

by Charles Bukowski

So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.

When you’re bad you didn’t pretend, it was just there. 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 walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn’t say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.

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.

Thousands of fish out there, eating each other. Endless mouths and assholes swallowing and shitting. The whole earth was nothing but mouths and assholes swallowing and shitting, and fucking.

The parents of rich kids tended to be more patriotic because they had more to lose if the country went under.

I looked in and I liked it. There was nothing happening there. It was a place to rest, to sleep. Everything in there was dead. I could see myself happily employed as a clerk there so long as no customers entered the door.

Get a man who works for nothing and you get a man who just likes to hang around.

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

“You can’t overestimate the stupidity of the general public.”

felt as if I were destined to be a murderer, a bank robber, a saint, a rapist, a monk, a hermit. I needed an isolated place to hide.

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.