Free Absence of the Hero by Charles Bukowski, Edited with an introduction by David Calonne

you forget this as the years go on. It’s nothing special until the female white liberal liberals make it so. We worked away. Then I said, “ LEROI JONES !”
    The one next to me turned, and here was the finger again. “ YOU BETTER NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT LEROI JONES !”
    â€œMy little girl says that I am afraid of him.”
    â€œ YOU ARE ! YOU ARE ! YOU BETTER NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT LEROI JONES !”
    â€œWhat will happen if I do?”
    â€œYou’ll be taken care of, that’s what will happen.”
    â€œYou mean mentally or physically?”
    â€œWe don’t care about the mental. His boys will handle you the other way.”
    â€œYou mean I can’t have freedom of speech?”
    â€œYou just be careful what you say! LeRoi Jones is an INTERNATIONALLY-RENOWNED PLAYWRIGHT ! Who are you? You just be careful!”
    â€œGive me a cigarette.”
    â€œHell no, buy your own. They sell them in the machines.”
    His friend walked over. “Hello, brother,” he said.
    â€œHello, brother,” I answered.
    â€œYou gonna invite me over to your house for breakfast?” (We work nights.)
    â€œSure. We’re having grits and beans. Only I don’t have a house.”
    â€œYou got a front door?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWell, I’m comin’ to the front door in broad daylight and ring your bell. I’m not comin’ to the back door so’s people will think I’m some servant or trashman or delivery boy. I’m comin’ to your front door!”
    â€œBrother Roy, my front door is your front door as long as the rent is paid.”
    â€œGood, and I’m gonna grow me some of that shit like you got on your chin and I’m gonna get me some young hippie girl and we gonna walk down Sunset Boulevard hand in hand, right down Sunset Boulevard.”
    â€œI’d like to get me one of those nice young blonde hippie girls myself,” I told him.
    After some remarks about Gov. Reagan, he walked over and sat down. We worked away, while back at my place the mother of my child got ready to go to a communist party meeting. Of all white members.
    A pretty fucked-up scene.
    Eh, LeRoi?
    Brother?

The Absence of the Hero
    Having earlier tried to pick up a very young whore whose stockings wrinkled down like stiff skins around her dirty ankles—she didn’t want me—I grabbed her ass in the alley, she farted , a fart that sank my soul from Singapore to Mt. Ganges, she farted and left with a wonderfully subnormal sailor. I walked out into the street and the green trees stuck their yellow teeth out at me. And their rubber cocks. I was a dead gagging finger in a sexless sky.
    Sadness. Sadness becomes so much, then it becomes something else—like a beerglass. Sadness is one thing, madness another. So you go to your place, towel the shit out of your ass, decide to go mad . . . what happens?
    THE DOORBELL RINGS ! A woman in a dusty black hat that flops down over her half-face. She wears a green cape and you can smell her underwear . . . probably a very big pussy that always emits this kind of white mulch, I don’t mean come I mean mulch , and she says, Would you like to donate to the starving children of Bionbiona? No, mama, no, please. . . . Oh, you were asleep? I’m sorry.  . . . Be sorry. But I wasn’t asleep, mama.
    She goes away.
    â€”the people are better than I
    the stones are better than I
    the dogturds on somebody’s lawn are
    better than I.
    3:24 A.M. I had gone someplace, evidently, and had come back. When I opened the door, I had the feeling that there was somebody in the room. I turned on this old lamp and stood there. Then the closet door with my paintings on them, pasted to them with snot and come and gum, that closet door opened and out came a man with a face that was almost yellow; hair that was both yellow and grey; ugly teeth and he smelled like hay and barndung,