From Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski

I don't know if it was those Chinese snails with the little round assholes or if it was the Turk with the purple stickpin or if it was simply that I had to go to bed with her seven or eight or nine or eleven times a week, or something else and something else, and something, but I was once married to a woman, a girl, who was coming into a million dollars, all somebody had to do was die, but there isn't any smog in that part of Texas and they eat well and go to the doctor for a scratch or a sneeze. She was a nympho, there was something wrong with her neck, and to get it down close and fast, it was my poems, she thought my poems were the greatest thing since Black, no mean Blake Blake. And some of them are. Or something else. She kept writing. I didn't know she had a million. I'm just sitting in a room on N. Kingsley Dr., out of the hospital with hemorrhages, stomach and ass, my blood all over the county general hospital, and they telling me after nine pints of blood and nine pints of glucose, "one more drink and you're dead." This is no way to talk to a suicide head. I sat in that room every night surrounded by full and empty beer cans, writing poems, smoking cheap cigars, very white and weak, waiting for the final wall to fall . . .
     Well, she came out on a bus, mama didn't know, papa didn't know, grandpa didn't know, they were on vacation somewhere and she only had a little change. I met her at the bus station, that is, I sat there drunk waiting for a woman I had never seen to get off a bus, waiting for a woman I had never spoken to, to marry. I was insane. I didn't belong on the streets. The call came. It was her bus. I watched the people swing through the door. And here comes this cute sexy blonde in high heels, all ass and bounce and young, young, twenty-three, and the neck wasn't bad at all. Could that be the one? Maybe she'd missed her bus? I walked up.
     "Are you Barbara?" I asked.
     "Yes," she said, "I guess you're Bukowski?"
     "I guess I am. Should we go?"
     "Alright."
     We got into the old car and drove to my place.
     "I almost got off the bus and went back."
     "I don't blame you."
     We got on in and I drank some more but she said she wouldn't go to bed with me until we got married. So we got some sleep and I drove all the way to Vegas and back. We were married. I drove all the way to Vegas and back without rest, and then we got into bed and it was worth it. The first time. She had told me she was a nymph but I hadn't believed it. After the third or fourth round I began to believe it. I knew that I was in trouble. Every man believes that he can tame a nymph but it only leads to the grave for the man . . .
     The crazy people up front who had once lived there had put these shelves all around the bed and on these shelves were pots and pots of geraniums. Big pots, little pots. All geraniums. When we fucked the bed would shake the walls and the walls would shake the shelves, and then I'd hear it: the slow volcano sound of the shelves giving away and then I'd stop. "No, no, don't stop, oh Jesus, don't stop!" and I'd catch the stroke again and down those shelves would come, down on my back and ass and head and legs and arms, and she'd laugh and scream and make it. She loved those pots. "I'm gonna rip those shelves off the wall," I would tell her. "Oh, no," she'd say. "Oh please, please don't!" She said it so nicely that I couldn't. So I'd hammer the shelves back, put the pots back on and we'd wait for the next time.