The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski

again.
    The townspeople became more exhilarated. I simply lost hope, came down to reality, and became terribly bored. Bored, that’s the only state I can name it. There is something about the beat of dance music. It can only hold me so long then I feel as if I have been flattened with hard and meaningless hammers.
    Nina and I had been living in a tent at the edge of town. I was sitting alone against a tree one evening outside the tent when she came running down the road, “Charlie, Charlie, I don’t want Marty, I want you ! Please believe me, goddamn you!”
    Her car was parked along the downward road and evidently Marty was chasing her in the moonlight. The big, dumb cowboy was on a horse. He caught up with her in the path and lassoed her and she screamed in front of me in the dirt. He pulled her blue jeans and panties off and put it in. Her legs raised into the pitch black sky.
    I couldn’t watch anymore so I walked down the pathway to the main road.
    I had a good five-mile walk to the nearest bus station in town.
    I felt good.
    I knew that they were finished by then and that I was free. I thought of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. And as I walked along, I knew that for the first time in years, my heart was free.
    The gravel that crunched under my feet provided the best dance of all. Better than all the kissing and dancing that Nina could offer me.

“You ain’t a real cowboy until you got some steer dung on your boots.” . . .
    Pall Mall McEvers—July 29, 1941
    Phoenix, Jan. 13th, 1972
    W ell, being a writer means doing many things so that the writing is not too lousily aligned from one base, and one doesn’t always choose the obvious—like Paris or San Francisco or a COSMEP meeting—so here I am typing standing up, à la Hemingway, only on an overturned table spool somewhere in an Arizona desert, a yellow monoplane with propeller going overhead—Africa and the lions far away—the lessons of Gertie Stein ingested and ignored—I have just stopped a dogfight between a small mongrel dog and a German police dog—and that takes some minor guts—and the mongrel lays on the cable spool below my feet—grateful and dusty and chewed—and I left the cigarettes elsewhere—I stand under a limp and weeping tree in Paradise Valley and smell the horseshit and remember my beaten court in Hollywood, drinking beer and wine with 9th rate writers and after extracting what small juices they have, throwing them physically out the door.
    Now a little girl walks up and she says, “Bukowski, what are you doing, you dummy?”
    Now I am called in for a sandwich in the place to my right. Literature can wait. There are 5 women in there. They are all writing novels. Well, what can you do with 5 women?
    The sandwiches are good and the conversation begins:
    â€œWell, I worked for this lawyer once and he had this guru on his desk and I got hot and took it into the woman’s john, and the head was just right, the whole thing was shaped just right, it was pretty good. When I finished I put the thing back on the lawyer’s desk. It took the paint right off the thing when I did it and the lawyer came back and noticed it and said, ‘What the hell happened to my guru?’ and I said, ‘What’s the matter? Is something wrong with it?’ Then he phoned up the company he got the thing from and complained because the paint had come off after he’d only had the thing a week . . . ”
    The girls laughed, “Oh hahaha ha, oh, hahaha!” I smiled.
    â€œI read in The Sensuous Woman ,” said another of the novelists, “that a woman can climax 64 times in a row, so I tried it . . . ”
    â€œHow’d you make out?” I asked.
    â€œI made it 13 times . . . ”
    â€œAll these horny guys walking around,” I said, “you ought to be ashamed.”
    Here I am, I thought, sitting with these women, sleeping with the most