Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski Page A

move back across the room and Al follows her. ‘You whore,’ he says, ‘you god-damned whore!’ Here’s this guy calling his wife a whore. ‘You whore!’ he screams. He corners her in one corner of the room and slaps her, rips her blouse off. ‘You whore!’ he screams again, and slaps her and knocks her down. Her skirt is torn and she kicks her legs and screams.
    “He picks her up and kisses her, then throws her on the couch. He’s all over her, kissing her and ripping at her clothes. Then he’s got her panties off and he’s at work. While he’s doing this she’s looking out from underneath to see if I’m watching. She sees that I’m watching and she starts squirming like a mad snake. They really go to it, finish it off; she gets up and goes to the bathroom and Al goes into the kitchen for more beers. ‘Thanks,’ he says when he comes out, ‘you were a big help.’”
    “Then what happened?” asked the barkeep.
    “Well, then the Rams finally scored, and there was a lot of noise on the tv, and she comes out of the bathroom and goes into the kitchen.
    “Al starts in on Reagan again. He says it is the beginning of the Decline and Fall of the West, just like Spengler said. Everybody is so greedy and decadent, the decay has really set in. He goes along that line for some time.
    “Then Erica calls us into the breakfast nook where the table is all set and we sit down. It smells good—a roast. There are slices of pineapple on top of it. It looks like an upper shank; I can see what almost looks like a knee. ‘Al,’ I say, ‘that thing really looks like a human leg from the knee up.’ ‘That,’ says Al, ‘is exactly what it is.’”
    “He said that?” asked the barkeep, taking a drink from under the bar.
    “Yeah,” answered Mel, “and when you hear something like that you don’t know exactly what to think. What would you think?”
    “I’d think,” said the barkeep, “that he was joking.”
    “Of course. So I said, ‘Great, cut me a nice slice.’ And Al did. There was mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, heated bread and the salad. There were stuffed olives in the salad. Al said, ‘Try a little of that hot mustard on that meat, it goes good.’ So I put some on. The meat wasn’t bad.
    “‘Listen Al,’ I said, ‘this isn’t really bad. What is it?’ ‘It’s like I told you, Mel,’ he answers, ‘it’s a human leg, the upper flank. It’s a 14-year-old boy we found hitchhiking on Hollywood Boulevard. We took him in and fed him and he watched Erica and me do the thing for three or four days and then we got tired of doing that, so we slaughtered him, cleaned out the innards, ran that down the garbage disposal and dropped him into the freezer. It’s a hell of a lot better than chicken, though actually I don’t prefer it to porterhouse.’”
    “He said that?” asked the barkeep, reaching for another drink under the bar.
    “He said that,” answered Mel. “Give me another beer.”
    The barkeep gave Mel another beer. Mel said, “Well, I still thought that he was joking, you know, so I said, ‘All right, let me see your freezer.’ And Al says, ‘Sure—over here.’ And he pulls back the lid and there’s the torso in there, a leg and a half, two arms and the head. It’s chopped up like that. It looks very sanitary, but it still doesn’t look so good to me. The head is looking up at us and the eyes are open and blue, and the tongue is sticking out of the head—it’s frozen to the lower lip.
    “‘Jesus Christ, Al,’ I say to him, ‘you’re a killer—this is unbelievable, this is sickening!’
    “‘Grow up,’ he says, ‘they kill people by the millions in wars andgive out medals for it. Half the people in this world are gonna starve to death while we sit around and watch it on tv.’
    “I tell you, Carl, those kitchen walls began to spin, I kept seeing that head, those arms, that chopped-up leg…There’s something so quiet about a murdered thing, somehow you get to