The Pleasures of the Damned. Charles Bukowski
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the old actors, the retired directors,
the ancient script writers, the aged cameramen, the prop men, stunt men, the old
actresses, all of whom were also there
waiting to die; they enjoyed his verve,
his antics, he was harmless and he took them back to the time when they
were still in the business.
then the doctors in authority decided that Tarzan was possibly dangerous
and one day he was shipped off to a mental institution.
he vanished as suddenly as if he’d been eaten by a
lion.
and the other patients were outraged, they instituted legal proceedings
to have him returned at once but
it took some months.
when Tarzan returned he was changed.
he would not leave his room.
he just sat by the window as if he had
forgotten
his old role
and the other patients missed
his antics, his verve, and
they too felt somehow defeated and
diminished.
they complained about the change in Tarzan
doped and drugged in his room
and they knew he would soon die like that
and then he did
and then he was back in that other jungle
(to where we will all someday retire)
unleashing the joyful primal call they could no longer
hear.
there were some small notices in the
newspapers
and the paint continued to chip from the hospital
walls,
many plants died, there was an unfortunate
suicide,
a growing lack of trust and
hope, and
a pervasive sadness:
it wasn’t so much Tarzan’s death the others mourned,
it was the cold, willful attitude of the
young and powerful doctors
despite the wishes of the
helpless old.
and finally they knew the truth
while sitting in their rooms
that it wasn’t only the attitude of the doctors
they had to fear,
and that as silly as all those Tarzan films had been,
and as much as they would miss their own lost
Tarzan,
that all that was much kinder than the final vigil
they would now have to sit and patiently endure
alone.
ah, Merryman,
a fighter on the docks,
killed a man while they were unloading
bananas.
I mean the man he killed
clubbed him first
from behind
with an anchor chain
(something about a woman)
and we all circled around
while
Merryman
did him in
under a hard-on sun,
finally strangling him to death
throwing him into the
ocean.
Merryman leaped to the dock
and walked
away, nobody tried to stop
him.
then we went back to work and
unloaded the rest of the bananas.
nothing was ever said about the murder
between any of us
and I never saw anything about it
in the papers.
although I saw some of the bananas
later in the
markets:
2 lbs. for a quarter
they seemed a
bargain.
(uncollected)
Sunday lunch at the Holy Mission
he got knifed in broad daylight, came up the street
holding his hands over his gut, dripping red
on the pavement.
nobody waiting in line left their place to help him.
he made it to the Mission doorway, collapsed in the
lobby where the desk clerk screamed, “hey, you
son-of-a-bitch, what are you doing?”
then he called an ambulance but the man was dead
when they got there.
the police came and circled the spots of blood
on the pavement
with white chalk
photographed everything
then asked the men waiting for their Sunday meal
if they had seen anything
if they knew anything.
they all said “no” to both.
while the police strutted in their uniforms
the others finally loaded the body into an ambulance.
afterwards the homeless men rolled cigarettes
as they waited for their meal
talking about the action
blowing farts and smoke
enjoying the sun
feeling quite like
celebrities.
the wind blows hard tonight
and it’s a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle
of red.
it’s when you’re on the row
that you notice that
everything is owned and that there are locks on everything. this is the way a democracy works: you get what you can, try to keep that and add to it if possible.
this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or