—SEPTUAGENARIAN STEW
The fifth grade was a little better. The other students seemed less hostile and I was growing larger physically. I still wasn’t chosen for the homeroom teams but I was threatened less. David and his violin had gone away. The family had moved. I walked home alone. I was often trailed by one or two guys, of whom Juan was the worst, but they didn’t start anything. Juan smoked cigarettes. He’d walk behind me smoking a cigarette and he always had a different buddy with him. He never followed me alone. It scared me. I wished they’d go away. Yet, in another way, I didn’t care. I didn’t like Juan. I didn’t like anybody in that school. I think they knew that. I think that’s why they disliked me. I didn’t like the way they walked or looked or talked, but I didn’t like my father or mother either. I still had the feeling of being surrounded by white empty space. There was always a slight nausea in my stomach. Juan was dark-skinned and he wore a brass chain instead of a belt. The girls were afraid of him, and the boys too. He and one of his buddies followed me home almost every day. I’d walk into the house and they’d stand outside. Juan would smoke his cigarette, looking tough, and his buddy would stand there. I’d watch them through the curtain. Finally, they would walk off.
Mrs. Fretag was our English teacher. The first day in class she asked us each our names.
“I want to get to know all of you,” she said.
She smiled.
“Now, each of you has a father, I’m sure. I think it would be interesting if we found out what each of your fathers does for a living. We’ll start with seat number one and we will go around the class. Now, Marie, what does your father do for a living?”
“He’s a gardener.”
“Ah, that’s nice! Seat number two … Andrew, what does your father do?”
It was terrible. All the fathers in my immediate neighborhood had lost their jobs. My father had lost his job. Gene’s father sat on his front porch all day. All the fathers were without jobs except Chuck’s who worked in a meat plant. He drove a red car with the meat company’s name on the side.
“My father is a fireman,” said seat number two.
“Ah, that’s interesting,” said Mrs. Fretag. “Seat number three.”
“My father is a lawyer.”
“Seat number four.”
“My father is a … policeman …”
What was I going to say? Maybe only the fathers in my neighborhood were without jobs. I’d heard of the stock market crash. It meant something bad. Maybe the stock market had only crashed in our neighborhood.
“Seat number eighteen.”
“My father is a movie actor …”
“Nineteen …”
“My father is a concert violinist …”
“Twenty …”
“My father works in the circus …”
“Twenty-one …”
“My father is a bus driver …”
“Twenty-two …”
“My father sings in the opera …”
“Twenty-three …”
Twenty-three. That was me.
“My father is a dentist,” I said.
Mrs. Fretag went right on through the class until she reached number thirty-three.
“My father doesn’t have a job,” said number thirty-three.
Shit, I thought, I wish I had thought of that.
One day Mrs. Fretag gave us an assignment.
“Our distinguished President, President Herbert Hoover, is going to visit Los Angeles this Saturday to speak. I want all of you to go hear our President. And I want you to write an essay about the experience and about what you think of President Hoover’s speech.”
Saturday? There was no way I could go. I had to mow the lawn. I had to get the hairs. (I could never get all the hairs.) Almost every Saturday I got a beating with the razor strop because my father found a hair. (I also got stropped during the week, once or twice, for other things I failed to do or didn’t do right.) There was no way I could tell my father that I had to go see President Hoover.
So, I didn’t go. That Sunday I took some paper and sat down to write about how I had seen the President. His open car, trailing flowing streamers, had entered the football stadium. One car, full of secret service agents, went ahead and two cars followed close behind. The agents were brave men with guns to protect our President. The crowd rose as the President’s car entered the arena. There had never been anything like it before. It was the President. It was him. He waved. We cheered. A band played. Seagulls circled overhead as if they too knew it was the President. And there were skywriting airplanes too. They wrote words in the sky like “Prosperity is just around the corner.” The President stood up in his car, and just as he did the clouds parted and the light from the sun fell across his face. It was almost as if God knew too. Then the cars stopped and our great President, surrounded by secret service agents, walked to the speaker’s platform. As he stood behind the microphone a bird flew down from the sky and landed on the speaker’s platform near him. The President waved to the bird and laughed and we all laughed with him. Then he began to speak and the people listened. I couldn’t quite hear the speech because I was sitting too near a popcorn machine which made a lot of noise popping the kernels, but I think I heard him say that the problems in Manchuria were not serious, and that at home everything was going to be all right, we shouldn’t worry, all we had to do was to believe in America. There would be enough jobs for everybody. There would be enough dentists with enough teeth to pull, enough fires and enough firemen to put them out. Mills and factories would open again. Our friends in South America would pay their debts. Soon we would all sleep peacefully, our stomachs and our hearts full. God and our great country would surround us with love and protect us from evil, from the socialists, awaken us from our national nightmare, forever …
The President listened to the applause, waved, then went back to his car, got in, and was driven off followed by carloads of secret service agents as the sun began to sink, the afternoon turning into evening, red and gold and wonderful. We had seen and heard President Herbert Hoover.
I turned in my essay on Monday. On Tuesday Mrs. Fretag faced the class.
“I’ve read all your essays about our distinguished President’s visit to Los Angeles. I was there. Some of you, I noticed, could not attend for one reason or another. For those of you who could not attend, I would like to read this essay by Henry Chinaski.”
The class was terribly silent. I was the most unpopular member of the class by far. It was like a knife slicing through all their hearts.
“This is very creative,” said Mrs. Fretag, and she began to read my essay. The words sounded good to me. Everybody was listening. My words filled the room, from blackboard to blackboard, they hit the ceiling and bounced off, they covered Mrs. Fretag’s shoes and piled up on the floor. Some of the prettiest girls in the class began to sneak glances at me. All the tough guys were pissed. Their essays hadn’t been worth shit. I drank in my words like a thirsty man. I even began to believe them. I saw Juan sitting there like I’d punched him in the face. I stretched out my legs and leaned back. All too soon it was over.
“Upon this grand note,” said Mrs. Fretag, “I hereby dismiss the class …”
They got up and began packing out.
“Not you, Henry,” said Mrs. Fretag.
I sat in my chair and Mrs. Fretag stood there looking at me.
Then she said, “Henry, were you there?”
I sat there trying to think of an answer. I couldn’t. I said, “No, I wasn’t there.”
She smiled. “That makes it all the more remarkable.”
“Yes, ma’am …”
“You can leave, Henry.”
I got up and walked out. I began my walk home. So, that’s what they wanted: lies. Beautiful lies. That’s what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me. I looked around. Juan and his buddy were not following me. Things were looking up.
—HAM ON RYE
dinner, 1933
when my father ate
his lips became
greasy
with food.
and when he ate
he talked about how
good
the food was
and that
most other people
didn’t eat
as good
as we
he liked to
sop up
what was left
on his plate
with a piece of
bread,
meanwhile making
appreciative sounds
rather like
half-
grunts.
he slurped his
coffee
making loud
bubbling
sounds.
then he’d put
the cup
down:
“dessert? is it
jello?”
my mother would
bring it
in a large bowl
and my father would
spoon it
out.
as it plopped
in the dish
the jello made
strange sounds,
almost fart-
like
sounds.
then came the
whipped cream,
mounds of it
on the
jello.
“ah! jello and
whipped cream!”
my father sucked the
jello and whipped
cream
off his spoon—
it sounded as if it
was entering a
wind
tunnel.
finished with
that
he would wipe his
mouth
with a huge white
napkin,
rubbing hard
in circular
motions,
the napkin almost
hiding his
entire
face.
after that
out came the
Camel
cigarettes.
he’d light one
with a wooden
kitchen match,
then place the
match,
still burning,
onto an
ashtray.
then a slurp of
coffee, the cup
back down, and a go
drag on the
Camel.
“ah that was a
good
meal!”
moments later
in my bedroom
on my bed
in the dark
the food that I
had eaten
and what I had
seen
was already
making me
ill.
the only good
thing
was
listening to
the crickets
out there,
out there
in another world
I didn’t
live
in.
One day, just like in grammar school, like with David, a boy attached himself to me. He was small and thin and had almost no hair on top of his head. The guys called him Baldy. His real name was Eli LaCrosse. I liked his real name, but I didn’t like him. He just glued himself to me. He was so pitiful that I couldn’t tell him to get lost. He was like a mongrel dog, starved and kicked. Yet it didn’t make me feel good going around with him. But since I knew that mongrel dog feeling, I let him hang around. He used a cuss word in almost every sentence, at least one cuss word, but it was all fake, he wasn’t tough, he was scared. I wasn’t scared but I was confused so maybe we were a good pair.
I walked him back to his place after school every day. He was living with his mother, his father and his grandfather. They had a little house across from a small park. I liked the area, it had great shade trees, and since some people had told me that I was ugly, I always preferred shade to the sun, darkness to light.
During our walks home Baldy had told me about his father. He had been a doctor, a successful surgeon, but he had lost his license because he was a drunk. One day I met Baldy’s father. He was sitting in a chair under a tree, just sitting there.
“Dad,” he said, “this is Henry.”
“Hello, Henry.”
It reminded me of when I had seen my grandfather for the first time, standing on the steps of his house. Only Baldy’s father had black hair and a black beard, but his eyes were the same—brilliant and glowing, so strange. And here was Baldy, the son, and he didn’t glow at all.
“Come on,” Baldy said, “follow me.”
We went down into a cellar, under the house. It was dark and damp and we stood awhile until our eyes grew used to the gloom. Then I could see a number of barrels.
“These barrels are full of different kinds of wine,” Baldy said. “Each barrel has a spigot. Want to try some?”
“No.”
“Go ahead, just try a god-damned sip.”
“What for?”
“You think you’re a god-damned man or what?”
“I’m tough,” I said.
“Then take a fucking sample.”
Here was little Baldy, daring me. No problem. I walked up to a barrel, ducked my head down.
“Turn the god-damned spigot! Open your god-damned mouth!”
“Are there any spiders around here?”
“Go on! Go on, god damn it!”
I put my mouth under the spigot and opened it. A smelly liquid trickled out and into my mouth. I spit it out.
“Don’t be chicken! Swallow it, what the shit!”
I opened the spigot and I opened my mouth. The smelly liquid entered and I swallowed it. I turned off the spigot and stood there. I thought I was going to puke.
“Now, you drink some,” I said to Baldy.
“Sure,” he said, “I ain’t fucking afraid!”
He got down under a barrel and took a good swallow. A little punk like that wasn’t going to outdo me. I got under another barrel, opened it and took a swallow. I stood up. I was beginning to feel good.
“Hey, Baldy,” I said, “I like this stuff.”
I tried some more. It was tasting better. I was feeling better.
“This stuff belongs to your father, Baldy. I shouldn’t drink it all.”
“He doesn’t care. He’s stopped drinking.”
Never had I felt so good. It was better than masturbating.
I went from barrel to barrel. It was magic. Why hadn’t someone told me? With this, life was great, a man was perfect, nothing could touch him.
I stood up straight and looked at Baldy.
“Where’s your mother? I’m going to fuck your mother!”
“I’ll kill you, you bastard, you stay away from my mother!”
“You know I can whip you, Baldy.”
“Yes.”
“All right, I’ll leave your mother alone.”
“Let’s go then, Henry.”
“One more drink …”
I went to a barrel and took a long one. Then we went up the cellar stairway. When we were out, Baldy’s father was still sitting in his chair.
“You boys been in the wine cellar, eh?”
“Yes,” said Baldy.
“Starting a little early, aren’t you?”
We didn’t answer. We walked over to the boulevard and Baldy and I went into a store which sold chewing gum. We bought several packs of it and stuck it into our mouths. He was worried about his mother finding out. I wasn’t worried about anything. We sat on a park bench and chewed the gum and I thought, well, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long long time to come. The park grass looked greener, the park benches looked better and the
flowers were trying harder. Maybe that stuff wasn’t good for surgeons but anybody who wanted to be a surgeon, there was something wrong with them in the first place.
—HAM ON RYE
love poem to a stripper
50 years ago I watched the girls
shake it and strip
at The Burbank and The Follies
and it was very sad
and very dramatic
as the light turned from green to
purple to pink
and the music was loud and
vibrant,
now I sit here tonight
smoking and
listening to classical
music
but I still remember some of
their names: Darlene, Candy, Jeanette
and Rosalie.
Rosalie was the
best, she knew how,
and we twisted in our seats and
made sounds
as Rosalie brought magic
to the lonely
so long ago.
now Rosalie
either so very old or
so quiet under the
earth,
this is the pimple-faced
kid
who lied about his
age
just to watch
you.
you were good, Rosalie
in 1935,
good enough to remember
now
when the light is
yellow
and the nights are
slow.
Jr. high went by quickly enough. About the eighth grade, going into the ninth, I broke out with acne. Many of the guys had it but not like mine. Mine was really terrible. I was the worst case in town. I had pimples and boils all over my face, back, neck, and some on my chest. It happened just as I was beginning to be accepted as a tough guy and a leader. I was still tough but it wasn’t the same. I had to withdraw. I watched people from afar, it was like a stage play. Only they were on stage and I was an audience of one. I’d always had trouble with the girls but with acne it was impossible. The girls were further away than ever. Some of them were truly beautiful—their dresses, their hair, their eyes, the way they stood around. Just to walk down the street during an afternoon with one, you know, talking about everything and anything, I think that would have made me feel very good.