numb your ass and your brain and your heart—
I was coming off an affair that had gone badly.
frankly, I was sliding down into a pit
really feeling shitty and low
when I lucked into this lady with a large bed
covered with a jeweled canopy
plus
wine, champagne, smokes, pills and
color tv.
we stayed in bed and
drank wine, champagne, smoked, popped pills
by the dozens
as I (feeling shitty and low)
tried to get over this affair that had gone
bad.
I watched the tv trying to dull my senses,
but the thing that really helped
was this very long
(specially written for tv) drama about
spies—
American spies and Russian spies, and
they were all so clever and
cool—
even their children didn’t know
their wives didn’t know, and
in a way
they hardly knew—
and I found out about counter-spies, double-spies:
guys who worked both sides, and
then this one who was a double-spy turned
into a triple-spy, it
got nicely confusing—
I don’t even think the guy who wrote the script
knew what was happening—
it went on for hours!
seaplanes rammed into icebergs,
a priest in Madison, Wisc. murdered his brother,
a block of ice was shipped in a casket to Peru
in lieu of the world’s largest diamond, and
blondes walked in and out of rooms eating
creampuffs and walnuts;
the triple-spy turned into a
quadruple-spy and everybody loved
everybody
and it went on and on
and the hours passed and
it all finally vanished like a paperclip in a
bag of trash and I
reached over and flicked off the set and
slept well for the first time
in a week and a half.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
