“I’ve got to go,” I told Tammie.
“Listen, all I’ve got to do is to make Dancy some breakfast and drive her to school. It’s O.K. if she sees you. Just wait here until I get back.”
“I’m going,” I said.
I drove home, drunk. The sun was really up, painful and yellow. . . .
44
I had been sleeping on a terrible mattress with the springs sticking into me for several years. That afternoon when I awakened I pulled the mattress off the bed, dragged it outside, and leaned it against the trashbin.
I walked back in and left the door open.
It was 2 pm and hot.
Tammie walked in and sat on the couch.
“I’ve got to go,” I told her. “I’ve got to go buy a mattress.”
“A mattress? Well, I’ll leave.”
“No, Tammie, wait. Please. The whole thing will take about 15 minutes. Wait here and have a beer.”
“All right,” she said. . . .
There was a rebuilt mattress shop about three blocks down on Western. I parked in front and ran through the door. “Fellows! I need a mattress . . . FAST!”
“What kind of bed?”
“Double.”
“We’ve got this one for $35.”
“I’ll take it.”
“Can you take it in your car?”
“I’ve got a Volks.”
“All right, we’ll deliver it. Address?”
Tammie was still there when I got back.
“Where’s the mattress?”
“It’ll be along. Have another beer. You got a pill?”
She gave me a pill. The light shot through her red hair.
Tammie had been voted Miss Sunny Bunny at the Orange County Fair in 1973. It was four years later now, but she still had it. She was big and ripe in all the right places.
The delivery man was at the door with the mattress.
“Let me help you.”
The delivery man was a good soul. He helped me put it on the bed. Then he saw Tammie sitting on the couch. He grinned. “Hi,” he said to her.
“Thanks very much,” I told him. I gave him 3 dollars and he left.
I went into the bedroom and looked at the mattress. Tammie followed. The mattress was wrapped in cellophane. I began ripping it off. Tammie helped.
“Look at it. It’s pretty,” she said.
“Yes, it is.”
It was bright and colorful. Roses, stems, leaves, curling vines. It looked like the Garden of Eden, and for $35.
Tammie looked at it. “That mattress turns me on. I want to break it in. I want to be the first woman to fuck you on that mattress.”
“I wonder who will be the second?”
Tammie walked into the bathroom. There was a silence. Then I heard the shower. I put on fresh sheets and pillow cases, undressed and climbed in. Tammie came out, young and wet, she sparkled. Her pubic hair was the same color as the hair on her head: red, like fire.
She paused before the mirror and pulled in her stomach. Those huge breasts rose toward the glass. I could see her, back and front, simultaneously.
She walked over and climbed under the sheet.
We slowly worked into it.
We got into it, all that red hair on the pillow, as outside the sirens howled and the dogs barked.
45
Tammie came by that night. She appeared to be high on uppers.
“I want some champagne,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
I handed her a twenty.
“Be right back,” she said, walking out the door.
Then the phone rang. It was Lydia. “I just wondered how you were doing. ...”
“Things are all right.”
“Not here. I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“And I don’t know who the father is.”
“Oh?”
“You know Dutch, the guy who hangs around the bar where I’m working now?”
“Yes, old Baldy.”
“Well, he’s really a nice guy. He’s in love with me. He brings me flowers and candy. He wants to marry me. He’s been real nice. And one night I went home with him. We did it.”
“All right.”
“Then there’s Barney, he’s married but I like him. Of all the guys in the bar he’s the only one who never tried to put the make on me. It fascinated me. Well, you know, I’m trying to sell my house. So he came over one afternoon. He just came by. He said he wanted to look the house over for a friend of his. I let him in. Well, he came at just the right time. The kids were in school so I let him go ahead. . . . Then one night this stranger came into the bar late. He asked me togo home with him. I told him no. Then he said he just wanted to sit in my car with me, talk to me. I said all right. We sat in the car and talked. Then we shared a joint. Then he “kissed me. That kiss did it. If he hadn’t kissed me I wouldn’t have done it. Now I’m pregnant and I don’t know who. I’ll have to wait and see who the child looks like.”
“All right, Lydia, lots of luck.”
“Thanks.”
I hung up. A minute passed and then the phone rang again. It was Lydia. “Oh,” she said, “I wondered how you were doing?”
“About the same, horses and booze.”
“Then everything’s all right with you?”
“Not quite.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I sent this woman out for champagne. . . .”
“Woman?”
“Well, girl, really . . .”
“A girl?”
“I sent her out with $20 for champagne and she hasn’t come back. I think I’ve been taken.”
“Chinaski, I don’t want to hear about your women. Do you understand that?”
“All right.”
Lydia hung up. There was a knock on the door. It was Tammie. She’d come back with the champagne and the change.
46
It was noon the next day when the phone rang. It was Lydia again.
“Well, did she come back with the champagne?”
“Who?”
“Your whore.”
“Yes, she came back. ...”
“Then what happened?”
“We drank the champagne. It was good stuff.”
“Then what happened?”
“Well, you know, shit …”
I heard a long insane wail like a wolverine shot in the arctic snow and left to bleed and die alone. . . .
She hung up.
I slept most of the afternoon and that night I drove out to the harness races.
I lost $32, got into the Volks and drove back. I parked, walked up on the porch and put the key into the door. All the lights were on. I looked around. Drawers were ripped out and overturned on the floor, the bed covers were on the floor. All my books were missing from the bookcase, including the books I had written, 20 or so. And my typewriter was gone and my toaster was gone and my radio was gone and my paintings were gone.
Lydia, I thought.
All she’d left me was my t.v. because she knew I never looked at it.
I walked outside and there was Lydia’s car, but she wasn’t in it. “Lydia,” I said. “Hey, baby!”
I walked up and down the street and then I saw her feet, both of them, sticking out from behind a small tree up against an apartment house wall. I walked up to the tree and said, “Look, what the hell’s the matter with you?”
Lydia just stood there. She had two shopping bags full of my books and a portfolio of my paintings.
“Look, I’ve got to have my books and paintings back. They belong to me.”
Lydia came out from behind the tree—screaming. She took the paintings out and started tearing them. She threw the pieces in the air and when they fell to the ground she stomped on them. She was wearing her cowgirl boots.
Then she took my books out of the shopping bags and started throwing them around, out into the street, out on the lawn, everywhere.
“Here are your paintings! Here are your books!
AND
DON’T
TELL
ME
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN! DON’T
TELL
ME
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN!”
Then Lydia ran down to my court with a book in her hand, my latest, The Selected Works of Henry Chinaski. She screamed, “So you want your books back? So you want your books back? Here are your goddamned books!
AND
DON’T
TELL
ME
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN!”
She started smashing the glass panes in my front door. She took The Selected Works of Henry Chinaski and smashed pane after pane, screaming, “You want your books back? Here are your goddamned books!
AND
DON’T
TELL
ME
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN! I DON’T
WANT
TO
HEAR
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN!”
I stood there as she screamed and broke glass.
Where are the police? I thought. Where?
Then Lydia ran down the court walk, took a quick left at the trash bin and ran down the driveway of the apartment house next door. Behind a small bush was my typewriter, my radio and my toaster.
Lydia picked up the typewriter and ran out into the center of the street with it. It was a heavy old-fashioned standard machine. Lydia lifted the typer high over her head with both hands and smashed it in the street. The platen and several other parts flew off. She picked the typer up again, raised it over her head and screamed, “DON’T
TELL
ME
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN!” and smashed it into the street again.
Then Lydia jumped into her car and drove off. Fifteen seconds later the police cruiser drove up. “It’s an orange Volks. It’s called the Thing, looks like a tank. I don’t remember the license number, but the letters are
HZY
, like
HAZY
, got it?”
“Address?”
I gave them her address. . . .
Sure enough, they brought her back. I heard her in the back seat, wailing, as they drove up.
“
STAND
BACK!” said one cop as he jumped out. He followed me up to my place. He walked inside and stepped on some broken glass. For some reason he shone his flashlight on the ceiling and the ceiling mouldings.
“You want to press charges?” the cop asked me.
“No. She has children. I don’t want her to lose her kids. Her ex-husband is trying to get them from her. But please tell her that people aren’t supposed to go around doing this sort of thing.”
“O.K.,” he said, “now sign this.”
He wrote it down in hand in a little notebook with lined paper. It said that I, Henry Chinaski, would not press charges against one Lydia Vance.
I signed it and he left.
I locked what was left of the door and went to bed and tried to sleep.
In an hour or so the phone rang. It was Lydia. She was back home.
“
YOU-SON-OF-A-BITCH
,
YOU
EVER
TELL
ME
ABOUT
YOUR
WOMEN
AGAIN
AND
I’LL DO
THE
SAME
THING
ALL
OVER
AGAIN!”
She hung up.
47
Two nights later I went over to Tammie’s place on Rustic Court. I knocked. The lights weren’t on. It seemed empty. I looked in her mailbox. There were letters in there. I wrote a note, “Tammie, I have been trying to phone you. I came over and you weren’t in. Are you all right? Phone me. . . . Hank.”
I drove over at 11 am the next morning. Her car wasn’t out front. My note was still stuck in the door. I rang anyhow. The letters were still in the mailbox. I left a note in the mailbox: “Tammie, where the hell are you? Contact me. . . . Hank.”
I drove all over the neighborhood looking for that smashed red Camaro.
I returned that night. It was raining. My notes were wet. There was more mail in the box. I left her a book of my poems, inscribed. Then I went back to my Volks. I had a Maltese cross hanging from my rearview mirror. I cut the cross down, took it back to her place and tied it around her doorknob.
I didn’t know where any of her friends lived, where her mother lived, where her lovers lived.
I went back to my court and wrote some love poems.
48
I was sitting with an anarchist from Beverly Hills, Ben Solvnag, who was writing my biography when I heard her footsteps on the court walk. I knew the sound—they were always fast and frantic and sexy—those tiny feet. I lived near the rear of the court. My door was open. Tammie ran in.
We were both into each other’s arms, hugging and kissing.
Ben Solvnag said goodbye and was gone.
“Those sons of bitches confiscated my stuff, all my stuff! I couldn’t make the rent! That dirty son-of-a-bitch!”
“I’ll go over there and kick his ass. We’ll get your stuff back.”
“No, he has guns! All kinds of guns!”
“Oh.”
“My daughter is at my mother’s.”
“How about something to drink?”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Extra dry champagne.”
“O.K.”
The door was still open and the afternoon sunlight came in through her hair—it was so long and so red it burned. “Can I take a bath?” she asked. “Of course.” “Wait for me,” she said.
In the morning we talked about her finances. She had money coming in: child support plus a couple of unemployment checks with more to come.
“There’s a vacancy in the place in back, right above me.”
“How much is it?”
“$105 with half of the utilities paid.”
“Oh hell, I can make that. Do they take children? A child?”
“They will. I’ve got pull. I know the managers.”
By Sunday she was moved in. She was right above me. She could look into my kitchen where I typed my things on the breakfast nook table.
49
That Tuesday night we were sitting at my place drinking; Tammie, me and her brother, Jay. The phone rang. It was Bobby. “Louie and his wife are down here and she’d like to meet you.” Louie was the one who had just vacated Tammie’s place. He played in jazz groups at small clubs and wasn’t having much luck.
But he was an interesting sort.
“I’d rather just forget it, Bobby.”
“Louie will be hurt if you don’t come down here.”
“O.K., Bobby, but I’m bringing a couple of friends.”
We went down and the introductions went around. Then Bobby brought out some of his bargain beer. There was stereo music going, and it was loud.
“I read your story in Knight,” said Louie. “It was a strange one. You’ve never fucked a dead woman, have you?”