The Most Beautiful Woman in Town by Charles Bukowski

the time we ate small pancakes made of flour and water, or now and then we would steal some corn from somebody’s garden — one guy specialized in a corn garden — I don’t believe he got to eat a one of them, then there was always a bit of stealing from an outdoor market — I mean there was a vegetable stand in front of a grocery store — this meant an occasional tomato or two or a small cucumber, but we were petty thieves, small time, and we needed mostly luck. the cigarettes were easiest — a walk at night — somebody always left a car window down and a pack or half-pack of smokes on the dashboard. of course, the wine and the rent were the real problems and we fucked and worried about it.
    and like all the days of final desperation, ours arrived. no more wine, no more luck, no more anything. no more credit with the landlady or the liquor store. I decided to set the alarm clock for 5:30 a.m. and walk down to the Farm Labor Market, but even the clock didn’t work right. it had broken and I had opened it to repair it. it was a broken spring and the only way I could get the spring to work again was to break a portion of it off, hook it up again, lock up the works and wind it up. now if you want to know what a short spring does to an alarm clock or I guess any kind of clock, I’ll tell you. the shorter the spring is, the faster the minute and hour hands go around. it was some crazy clock, I’ll tell you, and when we were worn out with fucking to stop from worrying we used to watch that clock and try to tell what time it really was. you could see that minute hand moving — we used to laugh at it.
    then one day — it took us a week to figure it — we found that the clock moved thirty hours for each actual twelve hours of time. also it had to be wound every 7 or 8 hours or it would stop. sometimes we’d wake up and look at the clock and wonder what time it was. “well, shit, baby,” I’d say, “can’t you figure out the thing? the clock moves 2 and one half times as fast as it should. it’s simple.”
    â€œyeah, but what time did it say when we last set the clock?” she’d ask.
    â€œdamned if I know, baby, I was drunk.”
    â€œwell, you better wind it or it’ll stop.”
    â€œo.k.”
    I’d wind it, then we’d fuck.
    so the morning I decided to go to the Farm Labor Market I couldn’t set the clock. we got hold of a bottle of wine from somewhere and drank it slowly. I watched that clock, not knowing what it meant, and being afraid of missing the early morning, I just lay in bed and didn’t sleep all night. then I got up, dressed and walked down to San Pedro street. everybody seemed to be just standing around waiting. there were quite a few tomatoes lying in the windows and I picked up two or 3 of them and ate them. there was a làrge blackboard: COTTONPICKERS NEEDED FOR BAKERSFIELD. FOOD AND LODGING. what the hell was that? cotton in Bakersfield, Calif? I thought Eli Whitney and the cotton gin had put all that out of the way. then a big truck drove up and it turned out they needed tomato-pickers. well, shit, I hated to leave Linda in that bed all alone like that. she could never stay in bed too long alone by herself like that. but I decided to try it. everybody started climbing into the truck. I waited and made sure that all the ladies were on board, and there were some big ones. everybody was in, and then I started to crawl up. a large Mexican, evidently the foreman, started putting in the tailgates — “sorry, senor, full up!” they drove off without me.
    it was almost 9 p.m. by then and the walk back to the hotel took an hour. I passed all the well-dressed stupid-looking people. and was almost run over once by an angry man in a black Caddy. I don’t know what he was angry about. maybe the weather. it was a hot day. when I got back to the hotel I had to walk up the stairway because the