Alan Good was once a columnist for Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency. He is now an aspiring dirt farmer.

Some Prick (July 20, 2010. Issue 29.)

I was sitting on a washing machine in the community laundry room in the basement. The wash cycle lasted twenty-five minutes. I could have gone back to my apartment to wait, but my wife had recently had a pair of underpants stolen from an unattended machine, so I decided to stand guard. To pass the time, I had a book of short stories by Charles Bukowski.

It was the second day of 1998, and I was still hung over from New Year’s Eve. We had gone to the Goth bar down the road. The décor is rather morbid, but we used to go there because it was close, it was never crowded, and the drinks were cheap. We started too early, so I was drunk well before midnight, and the complimentary champagne was more than I could handle. Madeleine had been ready to leave since 10 p.m. because she was supposed to work the next day, although she ended up calling in sick. We shambled back toward the apartment a few minutes after midnight, and I whistled at a passing cop car and shouted, “Five-oh,” but maybe they didn’t hear me. Police are like everyone else: some are assholes, and some are decent human beings. I shouldn’t have teased the poor police officers, working late at night on a holiday, but when I get drunk I tend to holler at people and pretend to be belligerent. That type of behavior was less dangerous when I lived in England, which is not to say that I couldn’t have been glassed by some hard Briton, or brained with a Chelsea brick, but in the States nearly everyone has a gun and is longing, like a lurk-off hiding in the bushes, to unload on a passerby.

I didn’t know I would vomit until the first retch. Unfortunately, I was sitting on the toilet at the time, and I used the inside of my underpants as a receptacle until Maddie came in, dragged me off the toilet, and ordered me to disgorge into the bowl.

I slept all night, shivering, on the cold, tiled bathroom floor. Around 10 or 11 a.m., I felt strong enough to move to the bed, where I slept for several more hours. Around 4 p.m. I was able to take a bath and then sit on the couch to watch football. I used to be a heavy drinker, but now that I didn’t get drunk very often I was less adept at coping with the hangovers. While I recovered, my vomit-encrusted clothes stewed in a white garbage sack. I didn’t have the strength to wash them, and Maddie had to draw the line somewhere.

I normally did the wash on Tuesdays, and this was a Friday. I don’t like to vary my routines, but that is what happens when you throw up into your underpants. This was an emergency load.

So I was sitting on the washing machine, flaunting the sign on the wall that expressly forbade sitting on the machines, and reading Bukowski, when the door opened and two of my neighbors walked in with a full laundry basket. I didn’t know their names, only that I hated them. I never saw one without the other. He was of medium height and slender build with pale skin and brown eyes. A wispy goatee protruded from his chin. Aspiring to hipness, the smirking idiot usually wore ironically gauche high-water trousers, a vest over a tee shirt, and a derby hat. She was blond, pretty but unremarkable.

I hate to disparage the male sex organ, but this guy was a real prick. When we moved in, in July, Madeleine propped the lobby door open so we wouldn’t have to unlock it every time we carried something inside. He came along, with his pretty little girlfriend, and we witnessed the bourgeois overcome the bohemian in him. He instructed us not to prop the door open because then anyone could get into our building, and homeless people would have sex in the lobby of our building. I carried, by myself, a fairly heavy escritoire, which used to belong to my grandmother, and, calmly, I asked him to hold the door open or move his fucking ass, which he dutifully reported to the building manager, a decent guy, who informed me that it was fine to prop the door open as long as we were watching it and asked me to try to be civil to my neighbors. Later, Madeleine was carrying a box to the door as the prick came out of the building. He looked at her, smiled, and let the door slam in front of her.

There were only three washing machines in the laundry room, and three dryers, to be shared by everyone in the building, and all the machines were in use. The couple’s laundry basket was white, and they had slapped on it several stickers advertising their favorite bands. It wasn’t enough for this prick to constantly make a statement with his wardrobe—his laundry basket had to say something, too. (The basket said that he liked a couple pseudo-ska bands that had become popular in the last year or two.)

“Bukowski,” he ejaculated. “Wicked. I love Bukowski. He’s so raw, so real. Don’t you think?” The girlfriend, mute, just stared at me.

“Harumph,” I told him, without looking up from the book. I don’t go in for hero-worshipping, not that Bukowski was much of a hero. He was over-rated by his fawning admirers, and under-rated by his detractors. I don’t know whether he was one of the great American writers, but he was definitely one of our great personalities, and for a struggling, aspiring littérateur he was a convenient benchmark. I could tolerate decades of hardship and obscurity and hang my hopes on fame in my fifties.

“Yeah, he was great,” he said. “I mean, like, one of the truly great American writers. I would’ve loved to hear him read.”

Here’s what I wanted to say: “Let me ask you—what do you think he would have thought of you?” The derby boy, flustered, would say, “I don’t know, man. It’s impossible to know.” I would contradict him: “Well, Bukowski and I are kindred spirits, and I think you’re a prick.” Bukowski and I were never kindred spirits—I don’t believe in that bunkum—but it would have been a funny thing to say, the kind of thing you retell a thousand times to your friends, who would always, with some envy, say, “I can’t believe you really said that.” I don’t like confrontation, even with people whom I loathe, so I just grunted and continued reading. Bukowski probably wouldn’t have thought much of me—an unsuccessful writer who favored long sentences and ten-dollar words and liked Mailer and Capote—but he would have had a lot to say about the kid, who looked about thirty, in the derby hat.

“So, like, we’re gonna need that washer when you’re done, but we forgot our soap. We’re gonna leave our basket right here,” in front of the washer and beneath my dangling feet. “Can you make sure no one else uses this machine when you finish?”

I looked down and saw there were two minutes left in my cycle. I smiled, which they interpreted as a sign of my cooperation. I wasn’t reading Bukowski because I was hung over and thought he would be appropriate. Rent on Capitol Hill was higher than at our little one-bedroom back in Boulder, and we were running low on our wedding-gift money, so I had been spending too much time mulling over the benefits and disadvantages of finding regular employment, and, in that state of mind, I find it useful to read Bukowski, who always has a way of convincing me to remain a bum. It’s no use being a productive member of a society of which you largely disapprove.

The couple left. If one of them had stayed with their clothes, they wouldn’t have needed me to guard the machine. I guess, because we both read Bukowski, the prick thought we were kindred spirits, the kind of people who looked out for each other’s laundry. The cycle ended. I pulled out my clothes and dumped them in my own unadorned basket. They still stunk of beer and whiskey and vomit and needed to be run through a few more times, but I’d promised my neighbors the machine, in the bottom of which lay a few chunks of regurgitated food.