Free Hollywood by Charles Bukowski Page B

fails to follow direction. I will tell him, ‘You walk over there and say your line.’ He won’t do it. He’ll walk somewhere else and say some other line. And I’ll ask him, ‘Why do you do this?’ and he’ll answer, ‘I don’t know. I have no idea.’ Once we were shooting and he walked away and pulled down his pants and bent over. He wasn’t wearing shorts.”
    “God damn,” I said.
    “Or, he will say things like, ‘We must hasten the natural process of death.’ Or, ‘All men’s lives diminish me.’ “
    “Sounds like a hell of a guy.”
    “Ah, he is...”
    We drank into the early morning, far into the early morning.
    I awakened about noon and went downstairs and knocked at Jon’s door. There was no answer. I opened the door. Jon was gone. There was a note.
Dear Hank and Sarah:
Thanks much for all the drinks and everything. I felt like an honored guest.
Hank, your screenplay is a justification of my belief in you. It is even better than that. Please continue it.
I will phone you soon with my location and phone number.
This is a wonderful day. It’s Mozart’s birthday. There will be beautiful music all day....
yrs, Jon
    The note made me feel terrible and good at the same time, which was the way I felt most of the time anyhow. I went upstairs, pissed, brushed my teeth and got back into bed with Sarah.

16

    That night without Jon listening downstairs, the screenplay began to move. I was writing about a young man who wanted to write and drink but most of his success was with the bottle. The young man had been me. While the time had not been an unhappy time, it had been mostly a time of void and waiting. As I typed along, the characters in a certain bar returned to me. I saw each face again, the bodies, heard the voices, the conversations. There was one particular bar that had a certain deathly charm. I focused on that, relived the barroom fights with the bartender. I had not been a good fighter. To begin with my hands were too small and I was underfed, grossly underfed. But I had a certain amount of guts and I took a punch very well. My main problem during a fight was that I couldn’t truly get angry, even when it seemed my life was at stake. It was all play-acting with me. It mattered and it didn’t. Fighting the bartender was something to do and it pleased the patrons who were a clubby little group. I was the outsider. There is something to be said for drinking—all those fights would have killed me had I been sober but being drunk it was as if the body turned to rubber and the head to cement. Sprained wrists, puffed lips and battered kneecaps were about all I came up with the next day. Also, knots on the head from falling. How all this could become a screenplay, I didn’t know. I only knew that it was the only part of my life I hadn’t written much about. I believe that I was sane at that time, as sane as anybody. And I knew that there was a whole civilization of lost souls that lived in and off bars, daily, nightly and forever, until they died. I had never read about this civilization so I decided to write about it, the way I remembered it. The good old typer clicked along.
    The next day about noon the phone rang. It was Jon.
    “I have found a place. François is with me. It’s beautiful, it has two kitchens and the rent is nothing, really nothing...”
    “Where are you located?”
    “We’re in the ghetto in Venice. Brooks Avenue. All blacks. The streets are war and destruction. It’s beautiful!”
    “Oh?”
    “You must come see the place!”
    “When?”
    “Today!”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Oh, you wouldn’t want to miss this! There are people living under our house. We can hear them under there, talking and playing their radio! There are gangs everywhere! There’s a large hotel somebody built down here. But nobody paid their rent. They boarded the place up, cut off the electricity, the water, the gas. But people still live there. THIS IS A WAR ZONE! The police do not come in