"I'm sure."
The cops walked off and there I was with Lydia again.
29
The phone rang the next morning. Lydia had gone back to her place. It was Bobby, the kid who lived in the next block and worked in the porno bookstore. "Mindy's down here. She wants you to come and talk to her."
"All right."
I walked over with 3 bottles of beer. Mindy was dressed in high heels and a black see-through outfit from Frederick 's. It resembled a doll's dress and you could see her black panties. There was no brassiere. Valerie wasn't around. I sat down and twisted the beer caps off, passed the bottles.
"Are you going back to Lydia, Hank?" Mindy asked.
"Sorry, yes. I'm back."
"That was rotten, what happened. I thought you and Lydia were finished?"
"I thought we were. Those things are very strange."
"All my clothes are down at your place. I'll have to come get them."
"Of course."
"Are you sure she's gone?"
"Yes."
"She acts like a bull, that woman, she acts like a dyke."
"I don't think she is."
Mindy got up to go to the bathroom. Bobby looked at me. "I fucked her," he said. "Don't blame her. She had no other place to go."
"I don't blame her."
"Valerie took her to Frederick 's to cheer her up. Got her a new outfit."
Mindy came out of the bathroom. She'd been crying.
"Mindy," I said, "I've got to go."
"I'll be down later for my clothes."
I got up and walked out the door. Mindy followed me out there. "Hold me," she said.
I held her. She was crying.
"You're never going to forget me… never!"
I walked back to my place thinking, I wonder if Bobby fucked Mindy? Bobby and Valerie were into lots of strange new things. I didn't care for their lack of common feeling. It was the way they did everything without any show of emotion. The same way another person might yawn or boil a potato.
30
To pacify Lydia I agreed to go to Muleshead, Utah. Her sister was camping in the mountains. The sisters actually owned much of the land. It had been inherited from their father. Glendoline, one of the sisters, had a tent pitched in the woods. She was writing a novel, The Wild Woman of the Mountains. The other sisters were to arrive any day. Lydia and I arrived first. We had a pup tent. We squeezed in there the first night and the mosquitoes squeezed in with us. It was terrible.
The next morning we sat around the campfire. Glendoline and Lydia cooked breakfast. I had purchased $40 worth of groceries which included several 6-packs of beer. I had them cooling in a mountain spring. We finished breakfast. I helped with the dishes and then Glendoline brought out her novel and read to us. It wasn't really bad, but it was very unprofessional and needed a lot of polishing. Glendoline presumed that the reader was as fascinated by her life as she was-which was a deadly mistake. The other deadly mistakes she had made were too numerous to mention.
I walked to the spring and came back with 3 bottles of beer. The girls said no, they didn't want any. They were very anti-beer. We discussed Glendoline's novel. I figured that anybody who would read their novel aloud to others had to be suspect. If that wasn't the old kiss of death, nothing was.
The conversation shifted and the girls started chatting about men, parties, dancing, and sex. Glendoline had a high, excited voice, and laughed nervously, laughed constantly. She was in her mid-forties, quite fat and very sloppy. Besides that, just like me, she was simply ugly.
Glendoline must have talked non-stop for over an hour, entirely about sex. I began to get dizzy. She waved her arms over her head, "I'M THE WILD WOMAN OF THE MOUNTAINS! O WHERE O WHERE IS THE MAN, THE REAL MAN WITH THE COURAGE TO TAKE ME?"
Well, he's certainly not here, I thought.
I looked at Lydia. "Let's go for a walk."
"No," she said, "I want to read this book." It was called Love and
Orgasm: A Revolutionary Guide to Sexual Fulfillment. "All right," I said, "I'll take a walk then."
I walked up to the mountain spring. I reached in for another beer, opened it and sat there drinking. I was trapped in the mountains and woods with two crazy women. They took all the joy out of fucking by talking about it all the time. I liked to fuck too, but it wasn't my religion. There were too many ridiculous and tragic things about it. People didn't seem to know how to handle it. So they made a toy out of it. A toy that destroyed people.
The main thing, I decided, was to find the right woman. But how? I had a red notebook and a pen with me. I scribbled a meditative poem into it. Then I walked up to the lake. Vance Pastures, the place was called. The sisters owned most of it. I had to take a shit. I took off my pants and squatted in the brush with the flies and the mosquitoes. I'd take the conveniences of the city any time. I had to wipe with leaves. I walked over to the lake and stuck one foot in the water. It was ice cold.
Be a man, old man. Enter.
My skin was ivory white. I felt very old, very soft. I moved out into the ice water. I went in up to my waist, then I took a deep breath and leaped forward. I was all the way in! The mud swirled up from the bottom and got into my ears, my mouth, my hair. I stood there in the muddy water, my teeth chattering.
I waited a long time for the water to settle and clear. Then I walked back out. I got dressed and made my way along the edge of the lake. When I got to the end of the lake I heard a sound like that of a waterfall. I went into a forest, moving toward the sound. I had to climb around some rocks across a gully. The sound came closer and closer. The flies and mosquitoes swarmed all over me. The flies were large and angry and hungry, much larger than city flies, and they knew a meal when they saw one.
I pushed my way through some thick brush and there it was: my first real honest-to-Christ waterfall. The water just poured down the mountain and over a rocky ledge. It was beautiful. It kept coming and coming. That water was coming from somewhere. And it was running off somewhere. There were 3 or 4 streams that probably led to the lake.
Finally I got tired of watching it and decided to go back. I also decided to take a different route back, a shortcut. I worked my way down to the opposite side of the lake and cut off toward camp. I knew about where it was. I still had my red notebook. I stopped and wrote another poem, less meditative, then I went on. I kept walking. The camp didn't appear. I walked some more. I looked around for the lake. I couldn't find the lake, I didn't know where it was. Suddenly it hit me: I was LOST. Those horny sex bitches had driven me out of my mind and now I was LOST. I looked around. There was the backdrop of mountains and all around me were trees and brush. There was no center, no starting point, no connection between anything. I felt fear, real fear. Why had I let them take me out of my city, my Los Angeles? A man could call a cab there, he could telephone. There were reasonable solutions to reasonable problems.
Vance Pastures stretched out around me for miles and miles. I threw away my red notebook. What a way for a writer to die! I could see it in the newspaper:
HENRY CHINASKI, MINOR
POET, FOUND DEAD IN
UTAH WOODS
Henry Chinaski, former post office clerk turned writer, was found in a decomposed state yesterday afternoon by forest ranger W. K. Brooks Jr. Also found near the remains was a small red notebook which evidently contained Mr. Chinaski's last written work.
I walked on. Soon I was in a soggy area full of water. Every now and then one of my legs would sink to the knee in the bog and I'd have to haul myself out.
I came to a barbed wire fence. I knew immediately that I shouldn't climb the fence. I knew that it was the wrong thing to do, but there seemed no alternative. I climbed over the fence and stood there, cupped both hands around my mouth and screamed: " LYDIA!"