Interstate 40 For Charles Bukowski You already have your plans your image of the women coming to you blond and used to the water you smell salt in the air and money when you close your eyes and you decide to come You pack your toothbrush you try it on your friends you stop for cigarettes in a gas station And it takes you coming out again the wind the way the trucks pass I think how you stand there feeling for your wallet or your breathing striking a light then inhaling as you step down off the curb They do it the same way in the movies first with the wind and then a Greyhound sign a kid with a botched haircut and a dufflebag maybe two girls seen only once laughing and turning away outside the terminal Inside a drunk and his paper suitcase get tagged and separated one ticket apiece someone puts his last nickel in the pinball machine They get it right the producer the director thin as it is and sad as it is they get it right And we sit there watching the places we start from the places we wind up in sooner or later pass over us and no one blinks no one wakes up afterwards Everyone but everyone a moviegoer Even the drunk great once at following the hero and the waving grass at stepping over the derelict lightly with the rest of us Before the bottle took him and the fog inside him rose and left him a six-part ticket to the coast and forty maybe fifty cents The westbound express is now boarding passengers at gate five Places everyone It was just like in the movies the way I remember it There was hardly anything left of him then except for the eyes except for the way he sat there with the light on him looking out and me across the aisle the whole time thinking "It all comes easy to him the storefronts and railroad crossings here the lumber yards car bodies bars it all comes easy" But for me this is how it is in the towns The children run and you pass them At the crossroads faces women's faces most of them turning away from you inside the glass outside the glass the same I have never found it easy I find it the way it is the land like a flatiron there to here the towns small and broken at the hinges and wind and too much light all of it out of our reach now anyway no matter what my friends tell me who rub their hands together and the dust escapes them who walk through looking at scenery No I have no respect for the land I think I think of you shielding your eyes when you travel the sun at noon standing on the broken ridgelines "Half chalk" you think "half fire standing like that..." But you go on following electric wires letting your eyes glaze your weight shift a little and when the weather changes you watch the Indian beside you the one with the crewcut and bow tie fold his hands He's made the trip before this Indian or his uncle has or his sister Forgetting the hawk the shadow where their horses go to water forgetting the slap of the wind and the broken rock standing like that they pack overnight and make their way here with you Here they all come here to California where everything stays close to the heart everything works so they think and they come I know the way they come to it finally leaving the smell of sweat and alcohol behind the uneasy breathing They roll their magazines and step down blinking in their new sunglasses they get picked up or walk toward town against the wind in pairs alone And when I look again cypresses and redwoods cover them girls with copper earrings lemon groves earthquakes fire in the hills money (if they're lucky) money I know I have been here ten years now doing what they all do when they need to eat or stop for a smoke or be remembered I check the mail put the water on for coffee find my way downtown I come home at night and open up my curtains over California palm trees California-loving-the-water "And when it's like this" I think "I could come to it still the way they do the way you do all heart and teeth" But after ten years the suntan oil and chlorine and success run in me like a river cheap thrills cheap thrills on signs burning under the offramps acres of carpeted hallways doors with numbers on them and regret something like regret always part of it come morning It weighs too much with me the traffic and the leaden air love the way my neighbors work at it upstairs with the lights on and the TV going all this time and it never changes There's a swimming pool in Burbank like they say a yacht a white sand beach in Venice lettuce in the desert And in Hollywood a man I admire stumbles in his bedroom Drunk undoubtedly drunk again and I think "Night and his arms around it night and the wind in it making something for his middle age and mine" while people pull up in their cars outside and park and walk away while I sit up half the night with a light on still and curtains blowing listening to the palms outside my window bend and rattle and it weighs with me It weighs with me exactly the way you'd imagine William Timberman |