Come On In!. Charles Bukowski

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СКАЧАТЬ in some of the respected literary

      journals.

      then after a couple of early books

      out came a little volume, a sweet

      novelette, and he was truly

      famous.

      it was a tale about high society and

      a young girl and it was

      delightful and charming and just a bit

      naughty.

      Hollywood quickly made a movie out of

      it.

      then the writer bounced around Hollywood

      from party to party

      for a few years.

      I saw his photo again and again:

      a little elf-man with huge

      eyeglasses.

      and he always wore a long dramatic

      scarf.

      but soon he went back to New York and to all the

      parties there.

      he went to every important party thereafter for years

      and to

      some that weren’t very

      important.

      then he stopped writing altogether and just went

      to parties.

      he drank or doped himself into oblivion almost

      every night.

      his once slim frame more than doubled in

      size.

      his face grew heavy and he no longer looked

      like the young boy with the quick and dirty

      wit but more like an

      old frog.

      the scarf was still on display but his hats were

      too large and came down almost to his

      eyes;

      all you noticed was his

      twisted

      lurid

      grin.

      the society ladies still liked to drag him

      around New York

      one on each arm

      and

      drinking like he did, he didn’t live

      to enjoy his old age.

      so

      he died

      and was quickly

      forgotten

      until somebody found what they claimed was his secret

      diary / novel

      and then all the famous people in

      New York were very

      worried

      and they should have been worried because when it

      was published

      out came all the dirty

      laundry.

      but I still maintain that he never really did know how to

      write; just what and

      when and about

      whom.

      slim, thin

      stuff.

      ever so long ago, after reading

      one of his short stories,

      after dropping the magazine to the floor,

      I thought,

      Jesus Christ, if this is what they

      want,

      from now on

      I might as well write for

      the rats and the spiders

      and the air and just for

      myself.

      which, of course, is exactly what

      I did.

       literary chitchat

      my friend Tom, he liked to come over

      and he’d say, “let’s go get a coffee.”

      and my girlfriend would say, “you guys

      going to talk that literary stuff again?”

      and we’d go to this place where you paid

      for your first coffee and all the refills were

      free

      and we’d get a seat by the window and he

      would begin:

      Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos

      Passos mainly but others got in there

      too: e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, Dreiser,

      Jeffers, Céline and so forth.

      although I will admit I was mostly a

      listener and wondered what he was

      really getting at, if anything, I

      continued to listen and

      drink coffee after

      coffee.

      once he said, “look, I’ll take you to the

      place СКАЧАТЬ