Ham on Rye

by Charles Bukowski

My father smoked Camel cigarettes and he knew many tricks and games which he showed us with the packages of Camel cigarettes. How many pyramids were there? Count them. We would count them and then he would show us more of them. There were also tricks about the humps on the camels and about the written words on the package. Camel cigarettes were magic cigarettes.

My father didn’t like people. He didn’t like me. “Children should be seen and not heard,” he told me.

I had begun to dislike my father. He was always angry about something. Wherever we went he got into arguments with people. But he didn’t appear to frighten most people; they often just stared at him, calmly, and he became more furious.

I didn’t know if I was unhappy. I felt too miserable to be unhappy. It was like everything in the world had turned to lawn and I was just pushing my way through it all. I kept pushing and working but then suddenly I gave up. It would take hours, all day, and the game would be over. The guys would go in to eat dinner, Saturday would be finished, and I’d still be mowing.

I got up and walked out. I began my walk home. 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.

There were fist fights between men in the vacant lots and on street corners. Everybody was angry. The men smoked Bull Durham and didn’t take any shit from anybody.

That cat wasn’t only facing the bulldog, it was facing Humanity.

Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great.

They weren’t like grown-ups and parents. They laughed. Things were funny. They weren’t afraid to care. There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D. H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by.

It was good to read them all though. It made you realize that thoughts and words could be fascinating, if finally useless.

I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go. Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work. I felt like sleeping for five years but they wouldn’t let me.

Who was Col. Sussex? Just some guy who had to shit like the rest of us. 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.

The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day … was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn’t converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn’t know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me. And yet I knew that what I saw wasn’t as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily

believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street.

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

All my life, in that neighborhood, I had been walking into spider webs, I had been attacked by blackbirds, I had lived with my father. Everything was eternally dreary, dismal, damned. Even the weather was insolent and bitchy. It was either unbearably hot for weeks on end, or it rained, and when it rained it rained for five or six days.

Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I’ve got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought.

“You just rebel against everything. How are you going to survive?” “I don’t know. I’m already tired.”