Free Run With the Hunted by Charles Bukowski

them.
    Then there was a sound behind me.
    â€œHey! What are you doing?”
    It was an old man with a flashlight. He had a head like a frog’s head.
    â€œI’m watching the dance.”
    He held the flashlight right up under his nose. His eyes were round and large, they gleamed like a cat’s eyes in the moonlight. But his mouth was shriveled, collapsed, and his head was round. It had a peculiar senseless roundness that reminded me of a pumpkin trying to play pundit.
    â€œGet your ass out of here!”
    He ran the flashlight up and down all over me.
    â€œWho are you?” I asked.
    â€œI’m the night custodian. Get your ass out of here before I call the cops!”
    â€œWhat for? This is the Senior Prom and I’m a senior.”
    He flashed his light into my face. The band was playing “Deep Purple.”
    â€œBullshit!” he said. “You’re at least 22 years old!”
    â€œI’m in the yearbook, Class of 1939, graduating class, Henry Chinaski.”
    â€œWhy aren’t you in there dancing?”
    â€œForget it. I’m going home.”
    â€œ Do that. ”
    I walked off. I kept walking. His flashlight leaped on the path, the light following me. I walked off campus. It was a nice warm night, almost hot. I thought I saw some fireflies but I wasn’t sure.
    â€” H AM ON R YE

the burning of the dream
    ----
    the old L.A. Public Library burned
    down
    that library downtown
    and with it went
    a large part of my
    youth.
    I sat on one of those stone
    benches there with my friend
    Baldy when he
    asked,
    â€œyou gonna join the
    Abraham Lincoln
    Brigade?”
    â€œsure,” I told
    him.
    but realizing that I wasn’t
    an intellectual or a political
    idealist
    I backed off on that
    one
    later.
    I was a reader
    then
    going from room to
    room: literature, philosophy,
    religion, even medicine
    and geology.
    early on
    I decided to be a writer,
    I thought it might be the easy
    way
    out
    and the big boy novelists didn’t look
    too tough to
    me.
    I had more trouble with
    Hegel and Kant.
    the thing that bothered
    me
    about everybody
    is that they took so long
    to finally say
    something lively and/
    or
    interesting.
    I thought I had it
    over everybody
    then.
    I was to discover two
    things:
    a) most publishers thought that anything
    boring had something to do with things
    profound.
    b) that it would take decades of
    living and writing
    before I would be able to
    put down
    a sentence that was
    anywhere near
    what I wanted it to
    be.
    meanwhile
    while other young men chased the
    ladies
    I chased the old
    books.
    I was a bibliophile, albeit a
    disenchanted
    one
    and this
    and the world
    shaped me.
    I lived in a plywood hut
    behind a roominghouse
    for $3.50 a
    week
    feeling like a
    Chatterton
    stuffed inside of some
    Thomas
    Wolfe.
    my greatest problem was
    stamps, envelopes, paper
    and
    wine,
    with the world on the edge
    of World War II.
    I hadn’t yet been
    confused by the
    female, I was a virgin
    and I wrote from 3 to
    5 short stories a week
    and they all came
    back
    from The New Yorker, Harper’s ,
    The Atlantic Monthly .
    I had read where
    Ford Madox Ford used to paper
    his bathroom with his
    rejection slips
    but I didn’t have a
    bathroom so I stuck them
    into a drawer
    and when it got so stuffed with them
    I could barely
    open it
    I took all the rejects out
    and threw them
    away along with the
    stories.
    still
    the old L.A. Public Library remained
    my home
    and the home of many other
    bums.
    we discreetly used the
    restrooms
    and the only ones of
    us
    to be evicted were those
    who fell asleep at the
    library
    tables—nobody snores like a
    bum
    unless it’s somebody you’re married
    to.
    well, I wasn’t quite a
    bum. I had a library card
    and I checked books in and
    out
    large
    stacks of them
    always taking the
    limit
    allowed:
    Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence,
    e.e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, Fyodor
    Dos, Dos Passos, Turgenev,