NO LOVE SONGS

Dear Editor:

I realize I missed the deadline but I've been beset by trivialities, like arguments with the female, car breakdown, a house guest for one week, and various other things I can't remember. One of them I can remember is that I had to get my driver's license renewed. Each time I get a driver's license renewed I begin to realize how much older I am, it's really a sign that you're moving along toward the grave, a more telling sign than New Year's or birthdays, and although I really don't mind dying I do dislike the automatic certainty of it, so every four years at driver's-license renewal time I really foster upon myself one huge drunk. So, I fostered that and I was driving along the next day, took a left on Fountain and drove toward the Hollywood Department of Motor Vehicles but my head hurt too much to face it like that so I took a right, found a bar up near Hollywood Boulevard, think I was on Las Palmas or Cherokee, parked, got out, went in, sat down, got a Heineken from the barkeep, no glass, and took a good haul.

A couple of stools down sat an old gal who looked like she had porcupine bristles for hair on her head. She looked like she had cut a hole in the center of a bed sheet, a dirty bed sheet, for her head to slip through and had put the thing on.

''Hey,'' she said.

I looked at her more directly.

"I'm Helena the Gypsy," she said.

"Phillip Messbell, unemployed traffic controller,” I answered.

"Read your palm, Phillip?"

"How much?"

"A beer.”

"Okay.”

Helena dragged her Klan sheet over to the stool next to mine, grabbed my left hand, twisted it and began to finger my palm.

"Ah," she said, "you have a long life line... You will live a long time—"

"That’s already been done. Tell me something new."

"Ah," she rubbed some more, "Heineken is your favorite beer."

"I said cut the crap."

"Oh, now I see it!” she exclaimed.

"Yeah? What?"

"You're going to get fucked within the next hour."

"Who? By you?"

"Maybe. You got twenty-five dollars?"

"No."

"Not by me..."

She got her beer, I finished mine and got out of there. I got into the car and took a left at the boulevard. My head felt a little better. I'd have to pass the frigging test without having read the book, but that was all right. What I hated was standing in the long lines and looking at the backs of heads. The backs of heads didn't look as bad as the fronts but nevertheless it was horrifying enough. I had to get out of my mindstate about things. Maybe I'd go to India and learn how to climb up through my intestine when I was shitfaced. Something like that.

As I pulled up at the next signal I suddenly felt like I had to excrete. In order to keep my mind from my puckering asshole I glanced about the boulevard. I saw this woman sitting on the bus-stop bench, might have been M. Monroe come back to life, only a little more beat to crap. And with fuller flanks and certainly a more lascivious leer. I smiled at her pulled-back skirt which showed me so much more than I had seen in months and she saw me looking and smiled back. I was smiling. She was smiling. It was a smiling world. Just as the light turned green she jumped up and ran toward my car. I kicked out my right leg, the door opened and she slithered in like a grapevine to be plucked.

The guy in the car behind me honked: "If that whore don't kill you, nothing ever will!"

I hit the throttle and dug out. As I glanced over she was scratching one of her inner thighs.

"My name's Rosie," she said.

"Gordon Plugg," I told her.

Charles Bukowski

"You want Dip Shit," asked Rosie, "or Around the World? You want Epsom Salts, Brown Dog or the Yellow Sea? The Wire Whip? Suction Cup? The Broom Handle? The Fart-Suck? I do Three Hands Mary and the Chimney Sweep. What do you want?"

"I want to renew my driver's license."

"That'll be fifty bucks.”

"You do that?"

"Yeah."

"You're on."

She looked at me as she lit the remains of a small cigar. "You're a strange-looking old fart. You look like you should be dead but you forgot to die."

"I'll work it out."

"What's your problem?"

"Things bother me all day and all night, Rosie."

"Name some."

"Well, for instance, every time I put my pants on in the morning and reach down I always think, is the zipper going to work? Now, of course, it usually does. But what bothers me is why does this thought have to pass through me? Why do I need it? It's an energy burn, utterly useless—"

"Why don't you see a shrink?"

"What I need is a shrink who doesn't need a shrink and there aren't any of those."

"You telling me that almost everybody is nuts?"

"Well, almost everybody has zippers. It's just that their levels of intensity and confusion are different about zippers and other things like that.”

Rosie yawned, "How far is it to your place?"

"Shit. I thought we were going to your place!"

Rosie belched through a smoke ring from her cigar, "That'll be ten bucks extra."

"Okay, but I still want the Driver'sLicense Renewal job."

"You'll get it."

"That's gonna be something," I said.

"I could give you the Banana Split Cream right in the car while you're driving—"

"No, I want the Driver's License Renewal job."

"You really ready for that?"

"Every four years..."

Rosie directed me about the streets and then we were at her place. It looked as if it were built of plywood, the sides sagged a bit. But there was a stately palm out front. I followed her ass on in as it voluted, as it whirled and swirled and sang, demanding release from that skirt, demanding the release of that white substance from the nodules of Man—that stinking white substance which kept pushing the ugliness of the species forward through the useless centuries. I followed it, as had those before me.

Rose kicked the door open and I noted any number of urchins lolling or walking about. There was a little fellow bent over and working upon gluing a model airplane together. Rosie walked over and gave him a kick in the ass which rolled him up against the far wall. "David, I told you to stop sniffin' that glue! It eats away the margin between your brain and your fart sack!"

David shook his head, got clearance, gave Rosie the finger and yelled, "Eat shit and die!"

Another little fellow sat wearing a Tim Leary T-shirt. He looked like he had washed up upon the shores of nowhere at the age of four. There was a little girl holding up a photo of Burt Reynolds and putting a lit cigarette lighter to his great manly smiling mouth. The mouth blackened and fell open. "Burnt Reynolds," she said.

Rosie was looking at me. "Money first—"

I gave her a fifty and a ten and she put it someplace and began disrobing as I watched, and unlike most women she looked better out of clothing than in it.

"Rosie," I said quietly, "the children—"

"Nothin' they ain't seen many times. It's like an old movie, it bores them. And it bores me too."

"Now, Rosie, I want the Driver'sLicense Renewal job.”

"They always get what they pay for."

Rosie switched off the light which was dangling from a cord, then spreadeagled herself upon a dirty mat. I walked over, ripping open my fly and I fell into the magic immensity of that body—the breasts, the thighs. I thought of clouds and waterfalls, of being lucky at a game of craps, and then I thought, great Christ, I haven't even taken my clothes off, not even my shoes. My hands felt her hair, it seemed filled with bits of sand. She smelled like wet rubber gloves. I felt sad, I felt like weeping but I didn't know why. Then Rosie's mouth opened and I was upon it. She's lonely, I thought, she's really lonely. No, I thought, that's me... Her tongue was cold, I bit it and she dug her nails into my back, ripping my shirt. I felt some blood. I reached the finger hand down there and began playing, like with a musical instrument... It was all right, all right, and then I was in there and she was very good, it wasn't snapping pussy but the next best thing, and then I didn't know if it were night or day or where, but then I came back from the ceiling and I thought, it's only fucking, very good fucking, and I fucked and I ejaculated, rested upon the magic body, then rolled off and I was standing in front of a camera, there was a jolly old ugly fat woman with eyes like walnuts, she was about my age and she said, "Come on, smile! It won't hurt!"

I smiled. There was a flash—

"You have your temporary license," the old woman told me. "Within thirty to sixty days your regular license will be mailed to you."

Then I looked down and noticed that my zipper was open. I reached down to pull it shut. This time it didn't. Broken.

I walked out the exit and felt the cool air entering my ripped shirt in the back. My car was in the parking lot. I got in, lit a cigarette, kicked it over. I drove out of the lot and down the street. It hadn't been a bad day and there was much of the day left according to the car clock. Maybe I'd drive down to the beach or go to a movie. I disliked movies but hadn't seen one for quite some time. I decided upon that. I switched on the car radio and got a love song, a terrible love song. It was a world full of lousy love songs. I switched the radio off and then something reminded me that I had to excrete. Most probably my stillpuckering asshole.

I found a gas station three blocks down, pulled in, got out, walked toward the men's room. The station attendant saw me. "Hey, buddy, your zipper's open."

"Yeah, I know it is."

"Listen," he told me, "guys who use our crappers, we like them to get something here."

"Put some air in my tires," I told him.

I walked into the crapper, found the booth, they even had seat covers. I spread out three of them, pulled my stuff down and let it go. That's when I noticed your magazine spread there, cover ripped and shorn and wetted, so sad, you know, there on the shithouse floor, and as I dumped I remembered I had missed your deadline and decided to write and tell you about that, and this is it.

© Copyright 1983 by Charles Bukowski