Charles Bukowski - The Rat (Live) lyrics

The Rat

With one punch
At the age of sixteen and a half
I knocked out my father
A cruel chimey bastard with bad breath
And I didn't go home for some time
Only now and then to try to
Get a dollar from dear mama
It was 1937 in Los Angeles and it
Was a hell of a Vienna

I ran with these older guys
But for them it was the same
Mostly breathing hard air and robbing gas
Stations that didn't have any money
And the few lucky among us work part-time
As Western Union messenger boys
We slept in rented rooms that weren't rented
And we drank ale, and wine with
The shades down being quiet, Quiet
And then awakening the whole
Building with a fist-fight
Breaking mirrors and chairs and lamps
Then running down the stairway just
Before the police arrive
Some of us soldiers of the future
Running through those empty starving streets
And alleys of Los Angeles and all of us
Getting together later in Pete's
Room: a small cube of space under a stairway
There we were, packed in there
Without women without cigarettes
Without anything to drink
While the rich pawed away at their many
Choices and the young girls left them
The same girls who spit at our
Shadows as we walk past
It was a hell of a Vienna
Three of us under that stairway were
Killed in World War Two
Another one is now the manager
Of a mattress factory me?
I'm thirty years older
The town is four or five times
As big but just as rotten
And the girls still spit on my shadow
Another war is building for another reason
I can hardly get a job now for
The same reason I couldn't then
I don't know anything, I can't do anything
Sex? Well just the old ones knock
On my door after midnight i can't sleep
And they see the lights and are curious
The old ones
Their husbands no longer want them
Their children are gone
If they show me enough good
Leg, the legs go last, I go to bed with them
So the old women bring me love and I
Smoke their cigarettes as they talk, talk
Talk and then we go to bed again
And I bring them love
And they feel good and talk
Until the sun comes up, then we sleep
It's a hell of a Paris