Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski

go mad.

GOODBYE WATSON
    it’s after a bad day at the track that you realize that you will never make it, coming in stinking at the socks, a few wrinkled dollars in your wallet, you know that the miracle will never arrive, and worse, thinking about the really bad bet you made on the last race on the eleven horse, knowing it couldn’t win, the biggest sucker bet on the board at 9/2, all the knowledge of your years ignored, you going lip to the ten buck window and saying, “eleven twice!” and the old grey-haired boy at the window, asking again: “eleven?” he always asks again when I pick a real bad one. he may not know the actual winner but he knows the sucker bets, and he gives me the saddest of looks and takes the twenty. then to go out and watch that dog run last all the way, not even working at it, just loafing as your brain starts saying, “what the fuck, I gotta be crazy.”
    I’ve discussed this thing with a friend of mine who has many years at the track. he’s often done the same thing and he calls it the “death-wish,” which is old stuff. we yawn at the term now, but strangely, there’s still some basis in it yet. a man does get tired as the races progress and there IS this tendency to throw the whole game overboard. the feeling can come upon one whether he is winning or losing and then the bad bets begin. But, I feel, a more real problem is that you ACTUALLY want to be somewhere else – sitting in a chair reading Faulkner or making drawings with your child’s crayons. the racetrack is just another JOB, finally, and a hard one too. when I sense this and I am at my best, I simply leave the track; when I sense this and I am not at my best I go on making bad bets. another thing that one should realize is that it is HARD to win at anything; losing is easy. it’s grand to be The Great American Loser – anybody can do it; almost everybody does.
    a man who can beat the horses can do almost anything he makes up his mind to do. he doesn’t belong at the racetrack. he should be on the Left Bank with his mother easel or in the East Village writing an avant-garde symphony. or making some woman happy. or living in a cave in the hills.
    but to go the racetrack helps you realize yourself and the mob too. there’s a lot of murky downgrading of Hemingway now by critics who can’t write, and old ratbeard wrote some bad things from the middle to the end, but his head was becoming unscrewed, and even then he made the others look like schoolboys raising their hands for permission to make a little literary peepee. I know why Ernie went to the bull-fights – it was simple: it helped his writing. Ernie was a mechanic: he liked to fix things on paper. the bullfights were a drawingboard of everything: Hannibal slapping elephant ass over mountain or some wino slugging his woman in a cheap hotel room. and when Hem got in to the typer he wrote standing up. he used it like a gun. a weapon. the bullfights were everything attached to anything. it was all in his head like a fat butter sun: he wrote it down.
    with me, the racetrack tells me quickly where I am weak and where I am strong, and it tells me how I feel that day and it tells me how much we keep changing, changing ALL the time, and how little we know of this.
    and the stripping of the mob is the horror movie of the century. ALL of them lose. look at them. if you are able. one day at a racetrack can teach you more than four years at any university. if I ever taught a class in creative writing, one of my prerequisites would be that each student must attend a racetrack once a week and place at least a 2 dollar win wager on each race. no show betting. people who bet to show REALLY want to stay home but don’t know how.
    my students would automatically become better writers, although most of them would begin to dress badly and might have to walk to school.
    I can see myself teaching Creative Writing