I

i can picture old Hank now… sitting at the typer… drinking from a bottle of cheap wine… indian cigarette dangling from his thin lips… listening to Shostakovich on the radio… musing about losing his faith in women… looking in the mirror and smiling at his big head, his gray hair, his scraggly beard, his yellowing teeth, the hairs protruding from his nose and ears… “more wine,” he mutters.  “lots more wine’ll do the trick…”

he recalls his friend, a writer of some renown, who wrote about wandering around Paris, happily anesthetized, advising him not to drink alone…

“why not,” Hank asks the writer of some renown…

“because it’s undignified…”

“says who?”

“says me.”

“well, i’m afraid we have a difference of opinion…”

“my opinion is the only opinion that matters,” the writer of some renown says, fingering his Jesus dying on the cross necklace…

that’s when Hank suddenly realizes what a phony the writer of some renown really is…

“you know,” Hank says.  “i used to think you really knew a thing or two about masturbating the word to orgasm… granted, i couldn’t understand half of what you were writing about, but you did it with such aplomb that i gave you the benefit of the doubt… but now…”   he can’t even complete his thought…

“i’m sorry you feel that way, Hank,” says the writer of some renown… “i just feel like drinking is a very communal thing…” 

“communal thing?… a writer of your stature and the only word you can come up with is thing?”

“so sue me, i don’t have my fucking thesauras with me, you prick…”

“what the hell happened to you…?  you used to be so goddamn innovative… now all you do is sit around with your Asian girlfriends drinking wine and painting your little watercolors… what about The Word?  what about trying to shove it up the ass of the Literary Establishment?  you’ve gone soft, Henry!”

the writer of some renown scratches his earlobe and smiles sadly…
“Hank… i’m an old man… i’ve had way too many colonoscopys… i limp… i forget shit all the time… when i get up out of  a chair, i feel like the lower half of my body is completely paralyzed… i have cataracs… i can’t hear very well… as for The Word… and shoving it up the ass of the Literary Establishment… been there, done that, almost got the Pulitzer… i’m done, Hank… and if i wanna spend my time fucking Asian girls and drinking a couple bottles of shiraz a day and painting water colors of your ass, then goddamn it, that’s what i’m gonna do… it’s over… you come up with a better word than ‘thing’… ‘cuz it’s over for me…”

“how can it be over?” Hank says.

“the difference between you and i, Hank, is i’m not interested in trying to uncover or discover the answers to Life’s Really Important Questions anymore… truth-seeking is for the young…and the idealistic…and the ignorant…and when i say it’s over, i mean that that part of the journey is over for me… i don’t care about fighting the world any more…i don’t care about examining mine or anybody else’s exhistential crises… if that makes me shallow or lazy or a communist or a senile old man, so be it…”

II

that night, Hank is bent over his typer writing a poem about agony, confusion, horror, fear, and ignorance, when the phone rings…

“Mr. Chinaski?”

“uh heh?”

“Henry’s gone,” says a soft voice…

“gone where?” 

“he’s dead…”

“well, shit, i was just with him…”

“yes, i know…”

“what happened…?”

“his heart…”

“that figures…”

“Mr. Chinaski, Henry wanted me to tell you that he thought you were one of the finest writers he’s ever known… and that he hoped you wouldn’t give up like him… he said you’d know what he was talking about…”

“i do…”

there is a pretty lengthy pause, which gives them both a little time to breathe…

“well, i just thought you’d like to know, Mr. Chinaski…” says the soft voice…

“do you mind telling me who you are?” 

“i’m his nurse…”

“oh really…?”

“yes, sir…”

God, Hank thinks, the man was an invalid and was still getting as much pussy as ever… God bless him…

“well, thanks for letting me know,” Hank says, and he hangs up…

i can picture old Hank now… gulping the last of his wine, studying a self-portrait he painted the night before of him drinking alone and wondering how he can make it more dignified…

it’s perfect just as it is, he thinks, and continues working on another blunt-edged attack on his embattled and seemingly impossible relationship with his former self…