The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski Page A

beautiful one of them, and where are the men? Branding cattle, punching timeclocks, selling insurance . . . How can I bitch about my lot as a starving writer? I’ll find a way . . . Tomorrow I’ll go to Turf Paradise and see if the gods are kind. Surely I can outbet these cowboys and the old folks who come out here to die? Then there’s the poem. Patchen died Saturday night of a heart attack and John Berryman jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi Friday and they haven’t found his body yet. Things are looking better. These young guys write like Oscar Wilde with a social consciousness. There’s room at the top and nothing at the bottom. I can see myself walking through TIMES SQUARE and all the young girls saying, “Look there goes Charles Bukowski!” Isn’t that the meaning of living immortality? Besides free drinks?
    I finish my sandwich, let the beautiful one know that I still love her, soul and her body, then walk back into the desert to my overturned wooden reel, and I sit here typing now. I stand here typing now, looking at horses and cows, and over to my left are mountains shaped differently than those tiresome mountains north of L.A., and I’ll be back to L.A., it’s the only place for the literary hustler: at least I hustle best there, it’s my Paris, and unless they run me out like Villon I have to die there. My landlady drinks beer from the quart bottle and forces them upon me and takes ten bucks off the rent (a month) because I take out the tenants’ garbage cans and bring them back in. That’s more advantageous than a Great Writer’s Course .
    I got worried about the girls, though, they dance sexy with the cowboys at the local tavern and make big cow eyes at them; sun-tanned raw dudes who ain’t even read Swinburne yet . . . Nothing to do but drink beer, act stoical, indifferent, human, and literary.
    The little girl comes back:
    â€œHi, Bukowski, dummy! Without no shirt on, without no shoes on, without no pants on, without no panties on, bare-naked typing outside . . . .”
    She’s 3 years old and drives a toy tractor by, stops, looks back again:
    â€œHi, Bukowski, dummy! No pants on, no panties on, bare-naked typing in the sun . . . No hair on, bare-butt typing, drowning in the water . . . ”
    No hair on? The female, of course, is the eternal problem as long as that thing stands up. And living 50 years doesn’t bring a man any closer to solutions. Love still arrives 2 or 3 times in a lifetime for most of us, and the rest is sex and companionship, and it’s all problems and pain and glory . . .
    And here she comes across the dust, 31 years’ worth, cowboy boots, long red brown hair, dark brown eyes, tight blue pants, turtleneck sweater; she’s smiling . . .
    â€œWhatcha doin’, man?”
    â€œWriting . . . ”
    We embrace and kiss; her body folds into mine and those brown eyes reflect birds and rivers and sun; they are hot bacon, they are chili and beans, they are nights past and nights future, they are enough, they are more than enough . . . Where she learned to kiss I’ll never know. As we part, something stands out in front of me.
    â€œWe’ll go to the track tomorrow,” she says.
    â€œSure,” I say, “and how about this thing?”
    I look down.
    â€œDon’t worry. We’ll take care of it,” she says.
    We walk about and lock again over by the rabbit pen. Appropriate.
    â€œYou’re the horniest old man I ever met . . . ”
    I send her away soon so I can finish this column. I watch the movement of her ass as she walks across the desert toward the house. She bends over to pet a dog. Freud, this is what the wars are all about, you had some truth going there, even though it was slightly hyped . . .
    I stop another dog fight. This time 2 young girls walk through with a larger dog. The German police dog attacks. It is a good fight. I leap in with a stick, grab the large