Back in Town, Killing Time

It was 5:03. I had just gotten off work and I had time to kill. Joann wouldn’t clock out for another five hours at the market and she’s my ride home, thirty miles away, out in the sticks. So I went over to the undergraduate library, down to the media resources center where they have TVs and VCRs and a collection of movies you can watch silently with the headphones.

I checked out Fritz the Cat, an early 70s animated flick bastardized from an R. Crumb comic. I saw it once a few years before – it was around four in the morning in Erie, PA after a gig. I was pretty stoned and a lot of people were jabbering on cocaine, so the only thing I remembered about the cartoon was a certain perverted, psychedelic weirdness.

The corral they assigned me was facing a large window to the hallway, and I wondered if passersby could see me watching cartoon tits on little pot-smoking cartoon kittycats. I didn’t care one way or the other, but it was funny that such a distinguished university had such a piece of trashy toon-smut. I peered over my shoulder towards the hallway to look for Chancellor Moeser after a rabbit grabbed his bunnycock and took a piss on a pig dressed in a cop uniform in the middle of a bathtub orgy involving animated, ganja-puffing woodland creatures.

After the novelty of watching cartoon characters get high and fuck wears off, the flick is pretty piss-poor. No wonder Crumb killed Fritz with an ice pick after the film came out in 1972. Fritz is a college cat on some watered down version of the Keroaucian trip, trying to be cool with the “crows” and get “kicks” and whatnot. The story goes nowhere.

Next I checked out Bukowski at Bellevue. This was filmed in 1970 at Bellevue Community College in the state of Washington by some community college students, and it shows – the film quality is poor, the sound quality is poor. This was one of Buk’s earliest readings – he started getting paid for writing when he was in his 40s. Around this time he was writing for underground magazines, making enough cash that he could quit his job in January of the same year after twelve years at the post office. He wrote a novel about it, called Post Office. My best friend back home is a mailman now, and I got him the book for his birthday. He probably drinks as much as I do now.

Bukowski is nervous at first, reading poem after poem quickly, unscrewing a thermos full of whiskey or wine and taking gulps. Dirty, old, rough, unshaven, sweaty, greasy-haired, scarred, drunk, beaten, from skid-row Bukowski reading unembellished, down-and-out tales in his low, mellow voice tinged with a slight, creepy lisp about “waaan” (wine) and good women to a bunch of soft, well-dressed northwestern college students. A few Fritz the Cats sit on the side of the stage with hipster facial hair. They are too scared to applaud at the end of the poems. There’s a shot of a young beautiful girl looking horrified at the old poet blathering on about what it takes to get a piece of ass in “the modern age”. Bukowski a nervous lion in a cage full of fawn - nervous, not at the audience but at his own ability to turn them into a pile of steaming, bloody flesh. Bukowski loosens up a bit as he gets a buzz on: “If I’m not happy then you’re not gonna be happy. It’s best we both be all right.”

After watching the videos I walked across campus to a Mexican eatery on Franklin Street and got a chicken quesadilla and a Budweiser. I ate and drank and got out of there quickly. Some horrible Mexican singer was blasting over the speakers, and besides, I had to catch the last bus to Carrboro.

I walked out onto Franklin Street. It was almost empty. There was a black guy standing against the wall talking shit to himself. He was a tiny piece of plastic away from being considered sane by the popular culture.

I had a dollar’s worth of change jingling around in my pocket and I knew he was going to ask me for it. He came up to me and starting talking his game. I was in a giving mood, and a tired, not-giving-a-shit, thirsty mood.

“Alright,” I said. “But only if you get drunk with it.”

He paused and didn’t say anything. He thought I was fucking with him.

“No, I’m serious. I’m about to go get drunk myself,” I said.

“HA HA HA! Shee-it!” he said just like one of the crows in the Fritz movie. “He said he gonna go git drunk himself!”

“Merry Christmas,” I said, and gave him the change.

The bus came and as I was getting on he was walking toward the beer store, laughing and talking some more shit.

I never used to give to bums, but fuck it, I thought. It’s better than paying taxes.

At the back door of the bus stood a young, scrawny, white female crackhead in a red sweater that must have been 10 sizes too big for her, with the sleeves hanging down and flopping around every time she moved her arms.

“Back door please,” she said in a vacant, half-retarded crackhead voice. The driver opened the back door and she got out.

At the next stop she got on again. The bus hit a red light and she ran half a block.

The bus driver was terrible, riding the brakes all the way down Franklin Street and making all the passengers nauseated. They put the bad ones on the late shifts so they don’t get complaints from UNC employees riding to the Park-and-Ride lots at rush hour.

The crackhead girl in the oversized red sweater got off again down on West Franklin street. She was happy as could be, walking towards the ‘hood. She couldn’t have been older than 25, although her face looked 45. A woman on the bus whispered to her husband while eyeballing the girl through the window. They both shook their heads in disgust. I didn’t know what they were bothered about.

I got off at the market, went in, and got a Fosters oil can, not great beer but the cheapest deal in the house, and sat down at a table outside.

Sometimes a cashier will look at me with slight revulsion in her eyes because I am in there several times a week drinking alcohol. There’s not an alcohol culture here like there is in Pittsburgh or Ireland. Chapel Hill is a mixture of Northern yuppies and Southern Baptists, so you either have a glass of white wine on Friday or no booze at all. I’m a foreigner here as everywhere.

I finished the beer and got another, from the same cashier, five minutes before the store closed. I went outside to my table, cracked the beer and poured it into a pint glass.

Some of the lights went down and the Mexicans were cleaning up all around me. A short, stout Mexican lady was banging the garbage cans loudly behind me. She wanted me to leave so she could clear off my table. I hadn’t showered in over a week and I probably looked and smelled like another pile of garbage she was paid to throw out. That was alright with me.

I had to piss, but half an oil can of beer remained and so did another 45 minutes before Joann got off. So I walked around the building and took a piss on a tree behind the Harris Teeter, the neighboring supermarket.

I walked out of the darkness and down the alley back to where my beer was. The cashier who sold me the beers was walking the other way, toward her car. She knew exactly what I’d been doing. The piss puddle was seeping over the mulch of the tree and out to where the streetlight shown down on the pavement. I was too ashamed to make eye contact with her.

She probably went in to work the next day and told everybody about it.

“Do you know that fat kid with the black hair that drinks here every day?”
“Yeah, he’s in here all the time.”
“I saw him. PEEING. Behind the Harris Teeter.”
“GROSS!”
“Isn’t he engaged to Joann?”

Joann met me outside. We went over to the Harris Teeter and got some beer – it’s cheaper over there. After that we walked to her truck as I called my dad on the cell phone. It was his sixty-second birthday.

“Happy birthday, dad.”
“Thanks Bri”
He was happier and more talkative than usual.
“Yeah, Uncle Paul came over, yeah,” he said.
“Did he bring the Gentlemen’s Jack?”
“Yeah, yeah! How’d you know?”
He was shitfaced was how I knew, and speaking in a drawn-out, gargley whiskey-speak.

“I just took one little sip. Your mother was doin’ shots.”

I could hear my mom’s voice in the background, not picking up on the sarcasm: “I was not! You and Paul drank whole bottle!”

I wished the old man a happy birthday again and hung up, and we drove off into the cool dark fog of the North Carolina countryside with a twelve pack of bottles rattling in the bed.