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thought, what a bunch of horseshit. I am no different than I ever was. I might have even been a better man then, though I doubt it. The older I got the better I got. What a crazy elixir! Elixir? What was that? It sounded good, but not a savage word.
    “Bukowski is a beast,” said the woman at the party. “He’s horrible!”
    “Oh come now,” said the professor, “do you really think that?”
    (Dear old Dr. Corrington, he always said I was a “savage,” not a “beast.”)
    But I couldn’t get a drink in the barcar. All those picture windows, and no drink. All that dry desert, wanting my bones and my ass; snakes to crawl through my eye-sockets, and no drink.
    2 porters or waiters or whatever they were, they were standing in the vestibule (how’s that for a word?) talking to each other about the stockmarket and pussy and the stupidity of the white man. It had gone on for about 10 minutes and I had sat at the table, waiting. I always felt inferior around those neatly white-jacketed black men, as if they knew something that I didn’t. But they really didn’t know anything that I didn’t know, so I finally got up and weaved toward them, stood there a foot from them and listened to them talk. They ignored me. Finally their talk bored me so much that I broke into it:
    “Pardon me, please. Pardon me.”
    “Yes?” one of them asked.
    He would have said “yes sir” but I was already a bit drunk.
    “Can one of you gentlemen tell me where I can find the bartender or just who is the bartender?”
    “Oh,” said the other one, “I am the bartender.”
    “Would it be possible to get a scotch and water fairly soon or is the bar closed?”
    “Oh no, the bar is open.”
    “Then, please, I’d like a scotch and water. Beer chaser.”
    “Beer chaser, sir?”
    “Yes, please, if you will.”
    “Any kinda beer?”
    “No and yes. The best.”
    The savage went over and sat down. The s & w and beer arrived. The bill was atrocious, of course, and I also tipped atrociously. The other people in the barcar were well-dressed; I was the only poorly-dressed one, my shoes, in particular, being badly scuffed and worn. But now that I had found the bartender, everybody wanted him. I had spoiled his day. But the day of the train was over. The rich rode the jets and crashed to their deaths in planeloads totaling 186, or ended in Cuba, hijacked, pissed and scared. Only the poor rode the trains. The Mexicans, the Indians, the Negroes, the poets. The porters sniffed and lifted their noses at us. They remembered the better days. When everybody was laughing and throwing money. Now it was over.
    I ordered again. The same. I liked the picture window. It was a horror show. I kept imagining myself out there with the snakes and toads and cacti, and it was horrible. And then I imagined myself back on the train with the white-jacketed aristocratic blacks and the poor blacks and the starving Mexicans and Indians and it was still horrible, in or out, up or down; I drank it down. There wasn’t a woman on the train under 40. It was a shitty trip. Even on the first trip traveling toward that first book I had picked up a looker; all right, she had 2 small children, but what a body and legs, and we’d sat ass to ass, one of the kids in her lap, one in mine, both asleep, and she’d run that tongue down my throat while our flanks were together, and I’d felt her all over. Hardly a fuck, but it helped time go. And during the day I’d felt like a married man, but I allowed myself to drink all I wished and it was rather funny. Then helping her off at the New Orleans station and then skipping off to the great editor and his wife. “Bye bye, dear.” I’d bet she’d thought she’d hooked a damn fool. Well, she would have, I suppose. Thank god for the great editor and his pages that last 2,000 years.
    Now there was nobody. Not a cunt under 40 within 400 miles. Life could be bitter. Even for a mindless savage.
    I stayed on in the barcar, through the