Read Online Run With the Hunted by Charles Bukowski - Free Book Online Page A

again.
    My father didn’t believe in doctors who were not free. “They make you piss in a tube, take your money, and drive home to their wives in Beverly Hills,” he said.
    But once he did send me to one. To a doctor with bad breath and a head as round as a basketball, only with two little eyes where a basketball had none. I didn’t like my father and the doctor wasn’t any better. He said, no fried foods, and to drink carrot juice. That was it.
    I would re-enter high school the next term, said my father.
    â€œI’m busting my ass to keep people from stealing. Some nigger broke the glass on a case and stole some rare coins yesterday. I caught the bastard. We rolled down the stairway together. I held him until the others came. I risk my life every day. Why should you sit around on your ass, moping? I want you to be an engineer. How the hell you gonna be an engineer when I find notebooks full of women with their skirts pulled up to their ass? Is that all you can draw? Why don’t you draw flowers or mountains or the ocean? You’re going back to school!”
    I drank carrot juice and waited to re-enroll. I had only missed one term. The boils weren’t cured but they weren’t as bad as they had been.
    â€” H AM ON R YE
my old man
    ----
    16 years old
    during the depression
    I’d come home drunk
    and all my clothing—
    shorts, shirts, stockings—
    suitcase, and pages of
    short stories
    would be thrown out on the
    front lawn and about the
    street.
    my mother would be
    waiting behind a tree:
    â€œHenry, Henry, don’t
    go in … he’ll
    kill you, he’s read
    your stories …”
    â€œI can whip his
    ass …”
    â€œHenry, please take
    this … and
    find yourself a room.”
    but it worried him
    that I might not
    finish high school
    so I’d be back
    again.
    one evening he walked in
    with the pages of
    one of my short stories
    (which I had never submitted
    to him)
    and he said, “this is
    a great short story.”
    I said, “o.k.,”
    and he handed it to me
    and I read it.
    it was a story about
    a rich man
    who had a fight with
    his wife and had
    gone out into the night
    for a cup of coffee
    and had observed
    the waitress and the spoons
    and forks and the
    salt and pepper shakers
    and the neon sign
    in the window
    and then had gone back
    to his stable
    to see and touch his
    favorite horse
    who then
    kicked him in the head
    and killed him.
    somehow
    the story held
    meaning for him
    though
    when I had written it
    I had no idea
    of what I was
    writing about.
    so I told him,
    â€œo.k., old man, you can
    have it.”
    and he took it
    and walked out
    and closed the door.
    I guess that’s
    as close
    as we ever got.

    Â 
    ----
    I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn’t particularly want money. I didn’t know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn’t have to do anything. The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day … was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.
    My father had a master plan. He told me, “My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That’s two houses. That son gets his own house, that’s three houses …”
    The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family.