Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski Read Free Book Online

thought. He was nice looking, young, big, around six-three, two hundred pounds. White t-shirt. Nose a little too big. He might have had a few beers but he wasn’t drunk. Then the cop blew his whistle and motioned for the crowd to cross. The kid stepped into the street. “All right, come on everybody, it’s safe now, it’s safe to cross!” That’s what you think, kid, was my thought. The kid was waving his arms. “Come on, everybody!” I was walking right behind him. I saw the cop’s face. It got very white. I saw the eyes narrow to slits. He was a short, heavyset, young cop. He moved toward the kid. Oh jesus, here it comes. The kid saw the cop moving toward him. “Don’t you TOUCH me! Don’t you dare TOUCH me!” The cop grabbed him by the right arm, said something to him, tried to guide the kid back to the curbing. The kid broke the grip and walked off. The cop ran up behind him, got a hammer-lock on the kid. The kid broke out of that and then they were scuffling, whirling around. You could hear their feet in the street. People stood and watched from a distance. I was right on top of them. Several times I had to step back as they scuffled. I didn’t have anygod damned sense either. Then they were up on the sidewalk. The cop’s hat flew off. That’s when I got a bit jumpy. The cop didn’t look much like a cop without his cap, but he still had his club and his gun. The kid broke away again and started to run off. The cop leaped on him from behind, got an arm around his neck and tried to pull him over backwards, but the kid just stood there. And then he broke free. Finally the cop had him pinned against an iron guardrail outside a Standard Station parking lot. A white kid and a white cop. I looked across the street and saw five young blacks grinning and watching. They were lined up against a wall. The cop had his cap back on and was leading the kid down the street to a call box.
    I went in and got my stamps out of the machine. It was a screwy night. I almost expected a snake to drop out of there. But I just got stamps. I looked up and saw my friend Benny. “Did you catch the action, Benny?”
    “Yeah, when they get him to the station they’ll put on leather gloves and beat hell out of him.”
    “You think so?”
    “Sure. The city’s just like the county. They beat hell out of them. I just got out of the new county jail. They let the new cops work out on the prisoners there to get experience. You could hear them screaming as the cops beat them. They brag about it. While I was in, one cop walked past and said, ‘I just beat hell out of a wino!’”
    “I’ve heard about it.”
    “They allow you one phone call and this guy was on the phone too long and they kept telling him to get off. He kept saying, ‘just a minute, just a minute!’ and finally one cop got pissed and hung the phone up and the guy screamed, ‘I’ve got my rights, you can’t do that!’”
    “What happened?”
    “About four cops grabbed the guy. They took him so fast that his feet didn’t even touch the ground. They took him in the next room. You could hear him, they worked him over good. You know, they had us there, bending over, looking up our asses, looking in our shoes for dope, and they brought the kid out naked and he was bent over and trembling, shivering. You could see red welts all over his body. They just left him there, trembling against that wall. He had really had it.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “I was driving past the Union Rescue Mission onenight and two cops in a squad car were picking up a drunk. A cop got in the back seat with the drunk and I heard the drunk say ‘you dirty motherfucking cop!’ and I saw the cop take his club and jam the end of it, hard, right into the guy’s stomach. It was a hell of a blow and made me a little sick. It could have broken the stomach open or caused internal bleeding.”
    “Yeah, it’s a dirty world.”
    “You said it, Benny. See you around. Watch yourself.”
    “Sure. You