Free Hollywood by Charles Bukowski

ninety-five days...”
    There was wild applause.
    Sellers went on: “I am a recovering alcoholic...We are all recovering alcoholics...”
    “Let’s get out of here!” I said to Sarah.
    We had finished the wine. We rose and moved toward the exit. We walked to our car.
    “Son of a bitch,” I said, “where’s Jon? Why isn’t he here?”
    “Oh, I’m sure he’d seen the movie,” said Sarah.
    “He set us up. It’s kind of funny when you think about it.”
    “Those were all A. A. members in there...”
    We got in the car and headed toward the freeway.
    My idea about the whole thing was that most people weren’t alcoholics, they only thought that they were. It was something that couldn’t be rushed. It took at least twenty years to become a bona fide alcoholic. I was on my 45th year and didn’t regret any of it.
    We got on the freeway and headed back toward reality.

15

    I still had the screenplay to write. I was upstairs sitting in front of the IBM. Sarah was in the bedroom beyond the wall to my right. Jon was downstairs watching TV.
    I was just sitting there. A half a bottle of wine was gone. I had never had trouble before. In decades, I had never had a writer’s block. Writing had always been easy for me. The words just rolled out as I drank and listened to the radio.
    I knew that Jon was just listening for the sound of the typer. I had to type something. I began a letter to a fellow who taught English at Cal State Long Beach. We had been exchanging letters for a couple of decades.
    I began:
Hello Harry:
How’s it hanging? They’ve been running good. Badly hungover other day, got to track for 2nd race, gotta win on a 10-to-one-shot. I no longer use the Racing Form. I see everybody reading it and almost everybody loses. I’ve got a new system, of course, which I can’t tell you about. You know, if the writing goes to hell, I think I can make it at the track. Shit. I’ll tell you my system, why shouldn’t I? O.K. I buy a newspaper, any newspaper. I try to buy a different newspaper every day, just to shake up the gods. Then out of that newspaper I’ll choose any handicapper. Then I’ll line up his selections in order. Say there’s an 8 horse race. On my program I will mark next to each horse the order of his selection. Example:
horse 1. 7
horse 2. 3
horse 3. 5
horse 4. 1
horse 5. 2
horse 6. 4
horse 7. 8
horse 8. 6
The system? Well, you take the horse’s odds that go off below the number of the handicapper’s selection. If more than one set of odds goes off below, then take the greatest drop. For example, horse 1, selection 7 going off at 4-to-one is better than horse 6, selection 4 going off at 3-to-one. There is one exception to this system. If horse 4 goes off at below 1, that is 4/5 or below, then pass the race if there is nothing working against it. That is because plays on nothing but odds-on-favorites always show a loss.
The way I came up with this system was that when I was in highschool I was in the R.O.T.C. and we had to read the Manual of Arms and in this fat book there was a little bit about the Artillery. Now, remember this was 1936, long before radar and all the homing-in devices. In fact, the book was probably written for World War I, although it might have been compiled some time later, I’m not sure. Anyway, the way they figured how to lob an artillery shell was to take a consensus. The Captain would ask, “O.K., Larry, how far away do you think the enemy is?”
“625 yards, sir.”
“Mike?”
“400 yards, sir.”
“Barney?”
“100 yards, sir.”
“Slim?”
“800 yards, sir.”
“Bill?”
“300 yards.”
Then the Captain would add up the yards and divide by the number of men asked. In this case, the answer would be 445 yards. They’d log the shell and generally blow up a large proportion of the enemy.
Decades later I was sitting at the track one day and the Manual of Arms came back to me and I thought, why not apply the Artillery system to the horses? This system has worked