What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire Read online

  CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.

  for Marina Louise Bukowski

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part 1

  my father and the bum

  legs, hips and behind

  igloo

  the mice

  my garden

  legs and white thighs

  Mademoiselle from Armentières

  my father’s big-time fling

  the bakers of 1935

  the people

  the pretty girl who rented rooms

  too soon

  canned heat?

  Pershing Square, Los Angeles, 1939

  scene from 1940:

  my big moment

  daylight saving time

  the railroad yard

  horseshit

  man’s best friend

  the sensitive, young poet

  hunger

  the first one

  the night I saw George Raft in Vegas

  no title

  too many blacks

  white dog

  blue beads and bones

  ax and blade

  some notes on Bach and Haydn

  born to lose

  Phillipe’s 1950

  in the lobby

  he knows us all

  victory!

  more argument

  wind the clock

  what?

  she comes from somewhere

  lifedance

  the bells

  full moon

  everywhere, everywhere

  about a trip to Spain

  Van Gogh

  Vallejo

  when the violets roar at the sun

  the professionals

  the 8 count concerto

  an afternoon in February

  crickets

  the angel who pushed his wheelchair

  the circus of death

  the man?

  Christmas poem to a man in jail

  snake eyes?

  my friends down at the corner:

  smiling, shining, singing

  Bruckner

  this moment

  one more good one

  Part 2

  you do it while you’re killing flies

  the 12 hour night

  plants which easily winter kills

  the last poetry reading

  probably so

  assault

  raw with love

  wide and moving

  demise

  the pact

  75 million dollars

  butterflies

  4 Christs

  $180 gone

  blue head of death

  young men

  the meaning of it all

  guess who?

  I want a mermaid

  an unusual place

  in this city now—

  Captain Goodwine

  morning love

  an old jockey

  hard times on Carlton Way

  we needed him

  Nana

  poor Mimi

  a boy and his dog

  the dangerous ladies

  sloppy love

  winter: 44th year

  Hollywood Ranch Market

  rape

  gone away

  note left on the dresser by a lady friend:

  legs

  the artist

  revolt in the ranks

  life of the king

  the silver mirror

  hunchback

  me and Capote

  the savior: 1970

  la femme finie

  beast

  artistic selfishness

  my literary fly

  memory

  Carlton Way off Western Ave.

  at the zoo

  coke blues

  nobody home

  woman in the supermarket

  fast track

  hanging there on the wall

  the hookers, the madmen and the doomed

  looking for Jack

  apprentices

  38,000-to-one

  a touch of steel

  brown and solemn

  time

  nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen

  the way it works

  bright lights and serpents

  mean and stingy

  $100

  this particular war

  German bar

  floor job

  the icecream people

  like a cherry seed in the throat

  Part 3

  the ordinary café of the world

  on shaving

  school days

  neither a borrower nor a lender be

  sometimes even putting a nickel into a parking meter feels good—

  Mahler

  fellow countryman

  the young man on the bus stop bench

  computer class

  image

  the crunch (2)

  I’ll send you a postcard

  bravo!

  downtown

  the blue pigeon

  combat primer

  thanks for that

  they arrived in time

  odd

  an interlude

  anonymity

  what’s it all mean?

  one-to-five

  insanity

  farewell my lovely

  comments upon my last book of poesy:

  a correction to a lady of poesy:

  Beethoven conducted his last symphony while totally deaf

  on the sidewalk and in the sun

  what do they want?

  I hear all the latest hit tunes

  am I the only one who suffers thus?

  on lighting a cigar

  the cigarette of the sun

  to lean back into it

  dog fight 1990

  I used to feel sorry for Henry Miller

  locked in

  wasted

  Sunday lunch at the Holy Mission

  slaughter

  a vote for the gentle light

  be alone

  I inherit

  another day

  tabby cat

  the gamblers

  the crowd

  trouble in the night

  3 old men at separate tables

  the singer

  stuck with it

  action on the corner

  no guru

  in this cage some songs are born

  my movie

  a new war

  roll the dice

  About the Author

  Other Books by Charles Bukowski

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  blue beads and bones

  my father and the bum

  my father believed in work.

  he was proud to have a

  job.

  sometimes he didn’t have a

  job and then he was very

  ashamed.

  he’d be so ashamed that he’d

  leave the house in the morning

  and then come back in the evening

  so the neighbors wouldn’t

  know.

  me,

  I liked the man next door:

  he just sat in a chair in

  his back yard and threw darts

  at some circles he had painted

  on the side of his garage.

  in Los Angeles in 1930

  he had a wisdom that

  Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard,

  Nietzsche, Freud,

  Jaspers, Heidegger and

>   Toynbee would find hard

  to deny.

  legs, hips and behind

  we liked the priest because once we saw him buy

  an icecream cone

  we were 9 years old then and when I went to

  my best friend’s house his mother was usually

  drinking with his father

  they left the screen door open and listened

  to music on the radio

  his mother sometimes had her dress pulled

  high and her legs excited me

  made me nervous and afraid but excited

  somehow

  by those black polished shoes and those nylons—

  even though she had buck teeth and a

  very plain face.

  when we were ten his father shot and

  killed himself with a bullet through

  the head

  but my best friend and his mother went on

  living in that house

  and I used to see his mother going

  up the hill to the market with her

  shopping bag and I’d walk along beside

  her

  quite conscious of her legs and her

  hips and her behind

  the way they all moved together

  and she always spoke nicely to me

  and her son and I went to church and

  confession together

  and the priest lived in a cottage

  behind the church

  and a fat kind lady was always there

  with him

  when we went to visit

  and everything seemed warm and

  comfortable then in

  1930

  because I didn’t know

  that there was a worldwide

  depression

  and that madness and sorrow and fear were

  almost everywhere.

  igloo

  his name was Eddie and he had a

  big white dog

  with a curly tail

  a huskie

  like one of those that pulled sleighs

  up near the north pole

  Igloo he called him

  and Eddie had a bow and arrow

  and every week or two

  he’d send an arrow

  into the dog’s side

  then run into his mother’s house

  through the yelping

  saying that Igloo had fallen on

  the arrow.

  that dog took quite a few arrows and

  managed to

  survive

  but I saw what really happened and didn’t

  like Eddie very much.

  so when I broke Eddie’s leg

  in a sandlot football game

  that was my way of getting even

  for Igloo.

  his parents threatened to sue my

  parents

  claiming I did it on purpose because

  that’s what Eddie

  told them.

  well, nobody had any money anyhow

  and when Eddie’s father got a job

  in San Diego

  they moved away and left the

  dog.

  we took him in.

  Igloo turned out to be rather dumb

  did not respond to very much

  had no life or joy in him

  just stuck out his tongue

  panted

  slept most of the time

  when he wasn’t eating

  and although he wiped his ass

  up and down the lawn after

  defecating

  he usually had a large fragrant smear of

  brown

  under his tail

  when he was run over by an

  icecream truck

  3 or 4 months later

  and died in a stream of scarlet

  I didn’t feel more than the

  usual amount of grief

  and loss

  and I was still glad that I

  had managed to

  break Eddie’s leg.

  the mice

  my father caught the baby mice

  they were still alive and he

  flung them into the flaming

  incinerator

  one by one.

  the flames leaped out

  and I wanted to throw my father

  in there

  but my being 10 years old

  made that

  impossible.

  “o.k., they’re dead,” he told me,

  “I killed the bastards!”

  “you didn’t have to do that,”

  I said.

  “do you want them running

  all over the house?

  they leave droppings, they

  bring disease!

  what would you do with

  them?”

  “I’d make pets out of

  them.”

  “pets!

  what the hell’s wrong with

  you anyhow?”

  the flame in the incinerator

  was dying down.

  it was all too late.

  it was over.

  my father had won

  again.

  my garden

  in the sun and in the rain

  and in the day and in the night

  pain is a flower

  pain is flowers

  blooming all the time.

  legs and white thighs

  the 3 of us were somewhere

  between 9 and 10 years old

  and we would gather in the bushes

  alongside the driveway about 9:30

  p.m. and look under the shade

  and through the curtains at Mrs. Curson’s

  crossed legs—always

  one foot wiggling, such a fine

  thin ankle!

  and she usually had her skirt

  above the knee

  (actually above the knee!)

  and then above the garter that

  held the hose sometimes we could see

  a glimpse of her white thigh.

  how we looked and breathed and

  dreamed about those perfect

  white thighs!

  suddenly Mr. Curson would

  get up from his chair to

  let the dog out and

  we’d start running through strange yards

  climbing 5 foot lattice fences,

  falling, getting up, running for

  blocks

  finally getting brave again and

  stopping at some hamburger stand

  for a coke.

  I’m sure that Mrs. Curson never

  realized what her legs and white

  thighs did for us

  then.

  Mademoiselle from Armentières

  if you gotta have wars

  I suppose World War One was the best.

  really, you know, both sides were much more enthusiastic,

  they really had something to fight for,

  they really thought they had something to fight for,

  it was bloody and wrong but it was Romantic,

  those dirty Germans with babies stuck on the ends of their

  bayonets, and so forth, and

  there were lots of patriotic songs, and the women loved both the soldiers

  and their money.

  the Mexican war and those other wars hardly ever happened.

  and the Civil War, that was just a movie.

  the wars come too fast now

  even the pro-war boys grow weary,

  World War Two did them in,

  and then Korea, that Korea,

  that was dirty, nobody won

  except the black marketeers,

  and BAM!—then came Vietnam,