Hollywood

by Charles Bukowski

We live in a world where only the final survivors will be proven right.

It was very strange after you got the feeling of it: for each was laughing at how ridiculous it was, yet each believed.

“Love and Genius are two of the most over-used words in the language,” I said.

I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.

“Listen, Jon, if I worried about what the people cared about I’d never write anything.”

I was into it. All you needed was the first line, then everything followed. It was always there, it only needed something to set it running.

I didn’t remember going to bed. But in the morning, I was there.

“I have two rules. One is, never trust a man who smokes a pipe. The other is, never trust a man with shiny shoes.”

“I worry too much about my god damned soul.”

“It sounds horrible. Listen, all this sounds like pure shit. Maybe I’d be better off just paying taxes. I just don’t want anybody bothering me. I don’t want a tax man knocking on my door at midnight. I’ll even pay extra just to make sure they leave me alone.”

Of course, I was hungover and I needed a shave and I always wore clothing that somehow didn’t seem to fit me quite right and maybe all the years of poverty had just given me a certain look. But I didn’t think it was wise to judge a man from the outside like that. I would much rather judge a man on the way he acted and spoke.

“Let’s drink a while,” I said, “and readjust to our own reality.”

Another feature of that place were the knocks of unsavory women at 3 or 4 a.m. They certainly weren’t ladies of great charm, but having a foolish turn of mind, I felt that somehow they brought me adventure. The real fact of the matter was that many of them had no place else to go. And they liked the fact that there was drink and that I didn’t work too hard trying to bed down with them.

The note made me feel terrible and good at the same time, which was the way I felt most of the time anyhow. I went upstairs, pissed, brushed my teeth and got back into bed with Sarah.

In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners.

Writing was never work for me. It had been the same for as long as I could remember: turn on the radio to a classical music station, light a cigarette or a cigar, open the bottle. The typer did the rest. All I had to do was be there.

Basically, that’s why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

I felt hatred in the air but didn’t know what to do about it. Jon knew: he opened a few fresh bottles of wine.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

“The practice of law gets stranger all the time….”

I followed Jon through Hollywood, the light and the shadows of Alfred Hitchcock, Laurel and Hardy, Clark Gable, Gloria Swanson, Mickey Mouse and Humphrey Bogart, falling all around us.

We now knew something more but what it was seemed very vague and even perhaps a bit disagreeable. 29

Once you have been poor a long time you gain a certain respect for money. You never again want to be without any of it at all. That’s for saints and fools. One of my successes in life was that in spite of all the crazy things I had done, I was perfectly normal: I chose to do those things, they didn’t choose me.

I knew how he felt. A guy phoned me once and told me he was going to kill me because I had fucked his wife.

The man didn’t come to kill Jon the first night. On the second night Jon had a gun and waited. The man didn’t come. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

I had most of humanity pegged on a very low scale and preferred not even to take notice of them. So Sarah made them a bit more interesting, which I appreciated.

“I couldn’t do it,” I said, “worst thing in the world is being sober around a bunch of damn fool drunks.”

But one doesn’t expect perfection from a performance. A good imitation will do.

It suddenly seemed foolish to me that anybody wanted to know what I thought. The best part of a writer is on paper. The other part was usually nonsense.

I’m not happy around people and after I drink enough they seem to vanish.”

But what was the difference between a movie critic and the average movie-goer? Answer: the critic didn’t have to pay.

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity. I think that the racetrack keeps me aware of this.

That wasn’t in the film. You can’t put everything in a film.

The poem has some value, believe me. It keeps you from going totally mad.

You had to become a writer each time you sat down to the machine. It wasn’t that hard once you sat down in front of the machine. What was hard sometimes was finding that chair and sitting in it. Sometimes you couldn’t sit in it. Like everybody else in the world, for you, things got in the way: small troubles, big troubles, continuous slammings and bangings. You had to be in condition to endure what was trying to kill you.

“Don’t,” I said, “my enemies are the source of half my income. They hate me so much that it becomes a subliminal love affair.”

A bird flies, a snake crawls, I change typewriter ribbons.