Waiting to play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit
No matter what “dropped on your head as a child” attitude you want to take, that old jackass knew how to write. I had heard of him maybe two years ago, sitting in Jamie’s bar on Fifth with two prostitutes and a warm glass of beer, from a bartender who hit him a couple times in the face, worked the body a bit, he said. Came there every once in a while, they spewed from liquid mouths, asked to clean the place for beer and to get some action in the back room. The prostitutes wouldn’t touch him. They said he wasn’t their type, whatever that means.
“He don’t tip,” the bartender recalled. The girls nodded.
“Hank’s a real asshole,” the pink headed whore quipped.
I didn’t think much of the tender and his beasts, but the old man sounded too much like my father to forget. They spun all kinds of stupid tales about this Hank Chinaski; he only has half a liver, he once backed up traffic drunk and stumbling through Pasadena so bad that it took four days to clear it all out, he wrote a movie, he wrote poetry, mainly though, he was poor, drunk and tiresome.
“Where can you find this Chinaski?” I asked the tender.
“Somewhere, probly in the streets face down covered in termites.”
“I think he’s got a place over on Washington.” the pinky smiled at me moving her chair closer, “I could take you there.”
“How much.”
“Twenty bucks, and I’ll suck you off on the ride for twenty more.”
She opened her legs and flashed her fuzz. “Show me where the place is.”
I pulled up my pants in front of a broken white townhouse split into two bedrooms, one on top, one on bottom, as the cab pulled away. There was a brass six nailed to the door, I slammed hard. Deep lumbering breaths came from inside and a shadow licked the peep hole.
“Chinaski, they told me you could write.”
No answer.
I sat on the cement for a second rubbing my crotch, she worked me over pretty good. Cabbie wouldn’t stop fixing his rearview.
The gas station across the street sold little cigars and whisky in pint bottles, so I filled a brown bag and came back to the door. “Chinaski, you want a drink?”
The door swung open to the fat old man in a white undershirt and undershorts.
“Who the fuck are you.”
His face was ruined; a cheese grater could’ve done better than whatever did happen. His hair, thinned and almost lost, covered a liver spotted skull and his eyes caved under the mounds of skin covering them. I pulled out a pint and gave it to him, then pulled out another and sucked on it.
“Ok.”
Inside, the room stank of vomit, only a bed and a desk with paper scattered everywhere under wine bottles and ashes. “They told me you could write.”
“They don’t know shit.”
We drank three of the pints, passing them back and forth, like we had passed the pinky whore, sucking it dry and smoking the little cigars to pass the time while we sat in silence.
“So you want to be a writer,” he said to me choking on smoke.
“No, I don’t want to be.”
“So you are a writer.”
“Not yet.”
He reached for a leaf of paper on the ground and handed it to me.
and as my grey hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.
He rolled off of the plastic chair and crawled to the box radio smacking it on to the sound of Chopin. “Let the world sleep kid, and then you sleep with it.” He spilled the whiskey across his chest and lost consciousness.
There in front of me, an old man dropping a last desperate lie.
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