by Patrick H. Moore
From time to time, the pundits, philosophers and talking heads all wax learnedly on the nature of time. Some of the philosophical blatherings on this weighty subject are so dense and unreadable that even an educated person struggles to make much sense of them. Recently, however, Max Myers handed me a dog-eared crime novel by LA crime writer Charles Bukowski called Pulp and told me it was one of the best crime novels ever written. He also told me that that if I didn’t read it he was going to sic a Puerto Rican biker gang on my ass. This made me a little nervous. I knew Max didn’t mean it but the thought was nevertheless terrifying.
So I’ve been reading it and I’ve got to hand it to Max. It may not be the best crime novel ever written (that’s a tall order) but it’s damned good. Sad, funny, poignant, with moments of laugh-out-loud clarity that make you want to salute poor dead Bukowski.
At one point in the novel, Bukowski’s protagonist, a P.I. named Nick Belane is at the end of his rope and resorts to psychtherapy. While waiting for the shrink, who had a roomful of sad, desperate characters waiting to consult with him, Nick ruminates on the nature of time:
We waited and waited. All of us. Didn’t the shrink know that waiting was one of the things that drove people crazy? People waited all their lives. They waited to live, they waited to die. They waited in line to buy toilet paper. They waited in line for money. And if they didn’t have any money they waited in longer lines. You waited to go to sleep and then you waited to awaken. You waited to get married and you waited to get divorced. You waited for it to rain (note: life in LA is like that), you waited for it to stop. You waited to eat and then you waited to eat again. You waited in a shrink’s office with a bunch of psychos and you wondered if you were one.
I must have waited for so long that I slept and I must have been awakened by the receptionist shaking me. “Mr. Belane, Mr. Belane, you’re next!”
She was an…old gal… She startled me, her face was very close to mine. That’s what death must be like, I thought, like this old gal.”
“Honey,” I said, “I’m ready.”
* * * * *
Reading Pulp has got me to thinking about my own life and how despite the fact that I’m busy as a one-armed steeplejack, I nonetheless spend endless time waiting, even when I’m doing three jobs at once.
First thing in the morning I wait for the computer to go on. Then I wait to get into WordPress. Then when it’s time to go to my day job, I wait for the computer to turn off. I drive down the hill waiting to get on the freeway and then once I’m on the freeway I wait to get off it. A few blocks from the office I wait as I approach a gigantic sinkhole in the road (LA is full of sinkholes) and I wait as I gingerly navigate around the sinkhole, wondering if I’ll make it or if car and driver will be sucked down into the abyss. At the office I wait for the computer to turn on. I wait for the company email to come up and if the emails I need are not there I spend all day waiting for them to arrive. At the office we all wait for 
the cases to come in. Once we land the cases we wait for the checks to come in. (Because we rarely bounce checks, we fortunately don’t have to wait for them to clear.) While working on a case, we wait for the clients to tell us what really happened. Sometimes they never do. Throughout the case, we wait for the moment of truth when the judge pronounces the sentence. As the sentence rolls off the judge’s tongue I wait to see if any of the defendant’s relatives faint or scream. If stricken family members scream in frustration (foreign-born mothers are prone to this) I wait for the US Marshals to clear the courtroom. Once a defendant’s father with a serious heart condition fainted and I had to race downstairs and wait for the paramedics to show up so I could direct them to the disaster scene. We all waited to see if the paramedics could revive the father. Fortunately they did.
At the end of the work day I wait to make sure my balky work computer shuts off properly. The sneaky little bastard is just waiting for me to forget to turn it off. If I do forget it punishes me by rewarding me with the blue screen of death which is no doubt a harbinger of my own death which waits at some distance off in the future.
When I get home I wait for my home computer to turn back on.
In a larger sense my wife and I are waiting for our daughter to go off to college. Once she is gone we will no doubt wait for her to call home. Meanwhile I wait to see her latest grades which are periodically posted by a software service. She needs to pass calculus or she will be booted out of the universities that have already accepted her.
At the end of the evening I wait for the computer to turn back off. Then I wait to go to sleep waiting for the dreams to come. Fortunately I have no trouble sleeping so I am not plagued with Ambien nightmares. While asleep a part of me is waiting for my windup alarm clock to ring so that I can struggle out of bed so that I can wait for the computer to turn back on so that I can wait to get into WordPress so that…so that…so that I can wait some more…
* * * * *
Charles Bukowski had it right and I’m sure he knew it. He was a heavy drinker and he waited for years for the alcohol to destroy his liver. When he was finally hospitalized he waited to die of liver disease. He was too tough, however, and it turned out he had many more years to live. He wrote 45 books during his long and fabled career. Pulp was his last novel. Then death caught up with him and he was gone. But I’m still waiting. Waiting for him to be reincarnated as a crime writer or maybe as a psychotherapist. That would be the strangest fate of all. Of course by the time that finally happens I’ll be long gone waiting for god knows what.
Waiting is life and life is waiting. And death is the only way to get off the merry-go-round.