The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

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      “Yeah.”

      We drank a while. Then I said, “Lou, I gotta call it off early tonight. I’ve got something to take care of.”

      “Sure, kid.”

      He left and I went out and got a fifth of whiskey. I went down to the cellar. There was only one door down there. I knocked. The door opened and here stood this young piece in panties and bra, in high heels, with just this thin negligee on. I pushed my way in. She screamed:

      “Get out of here! You get out of here!”

      I took the fifth out of the bag and held it before her eyes.

      “Get out,” she said in a lower voice.

      “You’ve got a nice place here. Where are your glasses?”

      She pointed. I went over and got 2 waterglasses, filled them half up and we sat on the edge of the bed.

      “Drink up. I live upstairs.”

      I worked her breasts loose. They were fine. I kissed her on the throat and mouth. I was in form. We had another drink, then I worked her pants off and put it in. It was still good. I stayed all night, we went another round, and then once again before I left in the morning. She seemed to like me. And she was a very good piece.

      I was sitting up in Lou’s place one night and I asked him, “You seen your girlfriend lately?”

      “No, no, I meant to tell you. They threw her out. They threw her out of the cellar. I can’t find her anywhere. I’ve looked everywhere. God, I’m sick. What a piece she was! You don’t have any idea how I feel!”

      “Yes, I do, Lou.”

      We both drank one to her in silence.

      I have met enough writers, artists, editors, professors, painters, none of them were truly natural men, interesting individuals. They looked better on paper or in paint, and while you can’t deny this has importance, it is still very uncomfortable to sit across from these same creatures and listen to them talk or look upon their faces. The life-seed, if there is any, is lost in their work. For my amusement and fill and grace and look-upwardness I have had to seek elsewhere. And in the manswarm, stamped so alike, there is still always the individual madman or saint to be found. I have found many but will tell you about a few.

      There was this hotel at Beverly and Vermont . We were on the wine, my ladyfriend and I. Jane was a natural, and she had delicious legs and a tight little gash and a face of powdered pain. And she knew me. She taught me more than the philosophy books of the ages. We’d see some man or woman walking down the hall and they would reek of the death and the plague and the vomit of sell-out, and I’d feel it but stand silent in some morning hangover shade, rather cleaved in half again about how low the human being could descend without effort. And I’d be thinking this thing and then I’d hear her voice: “That son of a bitch! I can’t STAND him! He makes me sick!” Then she’d laugh and she always made up some nickname for the creature—like Greenjaws or Anteyes or Deadears.

      But to get on with it, one time we were sitting around our room drinking our port wine and she said, “Ya know, I think you’d like to meet the F.B.I.” She worked as a maid in the place and knew the roomers.

      “Forget it, sweetie,” I told her, “I’ve already met the F.B.I.”

      “Well, o.k.”

      We gathered the half empty wine bottle and the two or three full ones and I followed her down the hall. It was the darkest hall of hell, dozens of people leaning up against the wallpaper, all behind in the rent, drinking wine, rolling cigarettes, living on boiled potatoes, rice, beans, cabbage, hogshead soup. We walked a little way down and then Jane knocked, the insistent little knock that said: this is not trouble.

      “It’s Jane. It’s Jane.”

      The door opened and here stood a fat little bitch, rather ugly, a bit dangerous, demented, but still all right.

      “Come in, Jane.”

      “This is Hank,” she introduced me.

      “Hello,” I said.

      I came in and sat down in a straightback chair and one of the ladies went around filling the large waterglasses full of deathstink wine.

      Meanwhile, in the bed, unintroduced, sat, no sprawled, was this male creature ten years later than I.

      “What goes, shithead?” I asked him.

      He didn’t answer. He just looked at me. When you get a man who doesn’t care to rejoinder in common conversation, you’ve got a wild one, you’ve got a natural. I knew that I was in deep. He just SPRAWLED there under that dirty bedsheet, wineglass in hand, and worse, he looked quite handsome. That is, if you think the vulture is handsome and I think that he is. It is. He had the beak and eyes of living and he lifted that glass and ran the wine down his throat, one run down, all that deathstink wine, without a blink, since I was the heaviest drinker born in the last two centuries there was nothing for me to do but throw that filthy poison into my stomach, hold mentally to the sides of the chair and keep the straight pokerface.

      A refill. He did it again. I did it again. The two ladies just sat and watched. Filthy wine into filthy sadness. We went around a couple more. Then he started to babble. The sentences were energetic but muddled in content. Still, they made me feel better. And all the time, this big bright electric light overhead and these two drunken madwomen talking about something. Something.

      Then it happened—the sprawl was over. He pushed upward in the bed. The beautiful vulture eyes and the big electric light was upon us. He said it very quietly and with easy authority.

      “I am the F.B.I. You are under arrest.”

      And he would arrest us all, his woman, mine, me, and that was all. We would submit, then, the rest of the night would go on. I don’t know how many times in the next year that he put me under arrest, but it was always the magic moment of each evening. I never saw him get out of bed. When he crapped or urinated or ate or drank water or shaved, I had no idea. Finally, I decided that he just didn’t do these things—they happened in another way, like sleep or atomic warfare or snow melting. He realized that the bed is man’s greatest invention—most of us are born there, sleep there, fuck there, die there. Why get out? I tried to make his woman one night but she said that he would kill me if he ever found out. That would have been one way to get him out from under the sheets. Killed by an F.B.I. agent in dirty underwear. I let her go; she didn’t look that good.

      Then there was another night when Jane set me up for another. We were drinking. The same cheap stuff, of course. I had gone to bed once or twice with her and there wasn’t much else to do when she said: “Howja like to meet a killer?”

      “Wouldn’t mind,” I said, “wouldn’t mind a-tall.”

      “Less go.”

      She explained the whole thing to me on the way. Who he’d killed and why. He was now out on parole. The parole officer was a good guy, kept getting him these dishwasher jobs, but he kept getting drunk and losing them.

      Jane knocked and we went on in. Like I never saw the F.B.I. agent out of bed, I never saw the killer’s girlfriend get out of bed. She had СКАЧАТЬ