Ham on Rye

by Charles Bukowski

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

Something had happened. The bath towels knew it, the shower curtain knew it, the mirror knew it, the bathtub and the toilet knew it. My father turned and walked out the door. He knew it. It was my last beating. From him.

The girls seemed to be more serious about it. That’s why I didn’t really trust them. They seemed to be part of the wrong things. They and the school seemed to have the same song.

She had gotten so old that it was almost senseless for her to die.

You either lived or died. The back was something the assholes had never figured out how to amputate.

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

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.

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

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 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. In any event, it was hard to have them hanging around while I was eating my bologna sandwiches.

What was the fascination of the beach? Why did people like the beach? Didn’t they have anything better to do? What chicken-brained fuckers they were.

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.

Better than G. B. Shaw with that hard keel of a mind always scraping bottom, his labored wit finally only a task, a burden on himself, preventing him from really feeling anything, his brilliant speech finally a bore,

Yet, despite their smooth untouched bodies and minds they still were missing something because they were as yet basically untested. When adversity finally arrived in their lives it might come too late or too hard. I was ready. Maybe.

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.

doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

I walked up to and across the stage, took the diploma, shook the principal’s hand. It felt slimy like the inside of a dirty fish bowl. (Two years later he would be exposed as an embezzler of school funds; he was to be tried, convicted and jailed.)

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

Finally a Religionist and an Atheist got into it. They weren’t much good. I was an Agnostic. Agnostics didn’t have much to argue about.

Becker claimed Thomas Wolfe as an influence but he didn’t wail and ham it up like Wolfe did.

In high school I’d had an English teacher and it had been Poe, Poe, Edgar Allan Poe.

The war was going very well in Europe, for Hitler.

Never trust a man with a perfectly-trimmed mustache …

“Are you one of us?” “I don’t know. Only one thing I’m sure of.” “What’s that?” “I don’t like you. Is the rum ready?”

I would never set any trends or styles. My white t-shirt was stained with wine, burned, with many cigarettes and cigar holes, spotted with blood and vomit. It was too small, it rode up exposing my gut and belly button. And my pants were too small. They gripped me tightly and rose well above my ankles.

“God damn Thomas Wolfe! He sounds like an old woman on the telephone!”

I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future.

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

Then I nodded at the kid. I moved blue trunks in, both arms flailing. I felt I had to win. It seemed very important. I didn’t know why it was important and I kept thinking, why do I think this is so important? And another part of me answered, just because it is.