on being 20
my mother knocked on my rooming-house door
and came in
looked in the dresser drawer:
Henry you don’t have any clean
stockings?
do you change your underwear?”
Mom, I don’t want you poking around in
here...”
hear that there is a woman
who comes to your room late at
night and she drinks with you, she lives
right down the hall.”
she’s all right...”
Henry, you can get a terrible
disease.”
yeah...”
talked with your landlady, she’s a
nice lady, she says you must read a lot
of books in bed because as you fall to sleep at
night the books fall to the floor,
they can hear it all over the
house, heavy books, one at midnight,
another at one a.m., another at 2 a.m.,
another at four.”
after she left I took the library books
back
returned to the rooming house and
put the dirty stockings and the dirty
underwear and the dirty shirts into
the paper suitcase
took the streetcar downtown
boarded the Trailways bus to
New Orleans
figuring to arrive with ten dollars
and let them do with me
what they would.
they did.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
