Ham on Rye

by Charles Bukowski

So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies.

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.

When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great.

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

The poor parents were far less patriotic, and then often professed their patriotism only because it was expected or because it was the way they had been raised. Subconsciously they knew it wouldn’t be any better or worse for them if the Russians or the Germans or the Chinese or the Japanese ran the country, especially if they had dark skin. Things might even improve.

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.

Show me some leg. Show me some flank.” “You’re just a boy.” Then I said it. I don’t know where the words came from, but I said it, “I could tear you in half, baby, if you gave me the chance.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” “All right. Let’s see.” Then she did it. Just like that. She uncrossed her legs and pulled her skirt back. She didn’t have on panties. I saw her huge white upper flanks, rivers of flesh. There was a large protruding wart on the inside of her left thigh. And there was a jungle of tangled hair between her legs, but it was not bright yellow like the hair on her head, it was brown and shot with grey, old like some sick bush dying, lifeless and sad.

I looked at my father, at his hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training.

The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in the line who said, “I don’t want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!”

He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler’s attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They’d learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn...

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

I remembered what Ivan had said in The Brothers Karamazov, “Who doesn’t want to kill the father?”

I avoided any direct reference to Jews and Blacks, who had never given me any trouble. All my troubles had come from white gentiles. Thus, I wasn’t a nazi by temperament or choice; the teachers more or less forced it on me by being so much alike and thinking so much alike and with their anti-German prejudice. I had also read somewhere that if a man didn’t truly believe or understand what he was espousing, somehow he could do a more convincing job, which gave me a considerable advantage over the teachers.

“There are no good wars or bad wars. The only thing bad about a war is to lose it. All wars have been Noble Cause. It’s not a matter fought for a so-called good of who is right or who is wrong, it’s a matter of who has the best generals and the better army!” I loved it. I could make up anything I liked.

Never bring a lot of money to where a poor man lives. He can only lose what little he has. On the other hand it is mathematically possible that he might win whatever you bring with you. What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another.

I threw the combo lock into the trash too. I’d never liked that combination: 1, 2, 1, 1, 2. Not very mental. The address of my parents’ house had been 2122. Everything was minimal. In the R.O.T.C. it had been 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3,4. Maybe some day I’d move up to 5.

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.