“O.K., Teddy,” I said.
“Oh, Teddy!” said Helen from the bed.
“What, dear?”
“I love both of you . . . ”
The third night we were all sitting watching TV. I got up and walked behind Helen. I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her backwards out of her chair. I fell on her and began kissing her legs. Then I heard Teddy get up and he pulled me off of his wife.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “What’s wrong, Teddy?”
“Shut up!” he told me.
He picked Helen up by the hair, then slapped her and knocked her down.
“You whore!” he screamed. “You dirty rotten whore! You filthy whore! You’ve betrayed me with this man! I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”
He picked her up, ripped her dress, slapped her. Then he took off his belt and worked her over good.
“Betraying bitch! You rotten bitch! You’re a disgrace to all womanhood!” He took a moment to look at me: “And you, you bastard, you better get out while you can!”
“But Teddy . . . ”
“I’m warning you, Bukowski.”
He picked Helen up and carried her into the bedroom. I got my coat and walked out, walked down to the King’s Crow Bar and sat down and had a beer. That Teddy. What the hell kind of friend he turned out to be.
Driving in to Los Alamitos racetrack one night I passed this small farm and saw this large creature standing in the moonlight. There was something very odd about this creature, it drew me to it. It seemed a magnet, a signal. I mean, I braked my car and got out and walked toward the creature. I always got off the freeway early and drove past these little farms. It gave my mind time to relax, getting off the freeway like that and driving down a side road to the track took the pressure off of my mind and made a better gambler out of me. I didn’t say a winning one, I said a better one. I really didn’t have time to stop. I was already late for the first race, but there I was walking toward this fenced-in enclosure.
I walked up to the fence and there it was—a huge hog. I’m not much of a farm hand but I felt that this must simply be the largest hog alive, but that wasn’t the thing. There was something in that hog, something that forced me to stop my car. I stood at the fence looking at it. There was the head, and well, I’ll call it a face because that’s exactly what was on the front of the head. This face. Never had I seen a face such as that. I am not sure what had called me to it. People often joke about my ugliness saying I am the ugliest old man they have ever seen. I am rather proud of this. My ugliness was hard-worked for; I was not born that way. I knew it meant a passing through of areas.
I forgot about the races, about everything but that hog’s face. When one ugly admires another there is a transgression of sorts, a touching and exchange of souls, if you will. He, this hog, had the ugliest face I had seen in a lifetime of living. He was covered with warts and wrinkles and hairs, these long single hairs that cropped out obscenely and twisted—every place a hair shouldn’t be. I thought of Blake’s tiger. Blake had wondered how God had created such a thing, and now here was Bukowski’s hog and I wondered what had made that, and how and why. The deep ugliness reoccurred everywhere—it was wondrous. The eyes were small and mean and stupid, what eyes, as if all the evil and crassness that existed everywhere was registered there. And the mouth, the snout was horrible—gross, demented, slobbering, it was a stinking asshole of a snout and mouth. And the flesh of the face was actually decaying, rotting, falling off in pieces. The overall total of that face and body was beyond what could seem to register upon my brain.
My next thought came quickly—it’s human, it’s a human being. It came upon me so strongly that I accepted it. The hog had been standing ten or twelve feet off and then it began moving toward me. I couldn’t move although I felt some terror at its approach. Here it came toward me in the moonlight. It walked up to the fence and raised its head toward me. It was very close. Its eyes looked into my eyes and we stood there that way for some time, I believe, looking into each other. That hog recognized something in me. And I looked into those mean and stupid eyes. It was as if I were being given the secret of the world, and the secret was obvious and real and horrible enough.
It’s human, the thought came again, it’s a human being.
Suddenly it was too much, I had to break off; I turned and walked away. I got into my car and drove toward the racetrack. The hog rode in my brain, in my memory.
At the track I began to look at the faces. I saw a part of this face that fit the hog’s face and I saw a part of that face that fit the hog’s face, and here was another part, and here was another. Then I went to the men’s room and saw my face in the mirror. I am not one to linger before mirrors too long. I went out to bet.
That hog’s face was the sum total of that crowd, somehow. Of crowds everywhere. That hog had added it up and it stood there. It stood there behind that fence on the little farm two or three miles away. It was a night when I didn’t remember too much about the horses. After the races I didn’t have any desire to see the hog again. I took another road up . . .
A few nights later I explained to a friend of mine about the hog, about what I had seen and felt, mainly that the hog was a human caught in that body. My friend was an intellectual, well read.
“Hogs is hogs, Bukowski, that’s all there is to it!”
“But John, if you had seen that hog’s face you would have known.”
“Hogs is hogs, that’s all.”
I couldn’t explain it to him, nor could he convince me that “hogs is hogs.” Certainly not this hog . . .
I remember the first night I had worked in a slaughterhouse. They would kill the steer in another room and it would come to us skinned and gutted through this space in the wall, headless, hanging by the rear legs raw red, and we had to take the steer upon our shoulder and hang him up in the waiting trucks, this time by the gristle up near his shoulder. It was heavy work and the steer kept coming, a maze of steer, on and on. As the hours went on and I became more and more fatigued, the whole mass of oncoming freshly-murdered steer and working men became a bit mixed in my mind; sweat ran into my eyes and my vision became foggy. I was so tired I felt drunk. I laughed at the smallest things. My feet hurt, my back, everything. I was pushed into an area of fatigue beyond belief and I felt as if I were losing my identity. I no longer remembered where I lived or why, or what I was doing or why. The animals and the men mixed, and then I had the thought, why don’t they murder me? Why don’t they murder me and hang me in a truck? Why was I different from a steer? How could they tell? This thought was very strong because I could no longer tell the animals from the men except that the animals, I remembered, had been hanging by their legs.
As I left that night I felt that it would be my last night there and it was. So they never got to hang me in their bloody trucks . . . . no Bukowski steak for you, my dear. Steers is steers, of course, but some weeks later going into meat markets I couldn’t help but think that I was looking at murdered human flesh, transformed . . .
And it’s absurd, of course, but there are places, restaurants, and markets that have signs on the doors: NO ANIMALS ALLOWED. These signs are usually on a tin plate with white background and the letters are in red. NO ANIMALS ALLOWED. The sign is usually up near where the hand pushes the door open. When I see that sign there is always a small pause. I hesitate. Then I push on in. Nobody says anything. They go about their business.
One time, just to test the reactions of others, I stood outside a supermarket door with one of those red signs upon it. I watched the people. They simply walked in without hesitation or delay. It must be wonderful to have a mass mind—somebody tells you that you are a human being and you believe it. Somebody tells you that a dog is a dog and you go out and buy a dog’s license and some dog food. Everything is so neatly pocketed. There is no room for overlap or admixture . . . NO ANIMALS ALLOWED IN OUR ZOO . . .
I