Factotum (monster Blood Tattoo, #3)

Henry Chinaski, a young drifter and aspiring writer, arrives in New Orleans at five in the morning, carrying a battered cardboard suitcase patched with shoe polish. He finds a cheap room across from a bar called The Gangplank Cafe, stretching his money by eating one meal a day and drinking wine. When a man on the street offers him work, Chinaski walks away, remembering how his father's entire life revolved around his job. Nearly broke, he talks his way into a position at a magazine distributing house by telling elaborate lies, but quits after a few days when his demand for a raise is refused. A job at a small newspaper follows, but he spends his time drinking in a back alley and is fired.

Chinaski joins a railroad work gang heading west. He keeps to himself while the other men openly threaten him, but at every stop workers desert the train. When the crew reaches Los Angeles, Chinaski takes a streetcar to his parents' home. His father, a big man with large ears, immediately announces that Chinaski will be charged room and board. With both parents at work, Chinaski stays in bed, smokes his father's cigarettes, and listens to symphony music. His father berates him nightly for lacking ambition. One evening Chinaski wanders into a bar, gets locked in after closing, and drinks until dawn. Police follow him home and make him ring the doorbell. His father tries to force Chinaski's face into the vomit on the Persian rug. Chinaski punches his father across the room, and his mother tears open both sides of his face with her fingernails. He retreats to his bedroom thinking he had better find a job.

The next day, hitching a ride, he runs into his old college friend Timmy Hunter. They drink all day and end up passed out on the steps of a mortuary, causing a traffic jam. Chinaski wakes in a Malibu jail cell, is bailed out by his weeping father, and the fine is added to his room and board bill. He takes a job at an auto parts warehouse and stays long enough to pay off his debt. Having saved enough for bus fare, he quits and heads for New York City.

In New York, he rents a room on Third Avenue. Elevated trains stop level with his window, flooding the room with light and faces he perceives as hellish. He takes a night job placing advertising posters inside subway cars but quits after being paralyzed by fear working forty feet above the ground in total darkness. At a dog biscuit factory, he loads heavy metal screens into ovens, arriving drunk each night with blistered hands. After several weeks he walks out.

In Philadelphia, Chinaski cleans venetian blinds at a bar for five dollars, drinking free whiskey until he collapses. The patrons finish the job, and he spends his pay buying the whole bar a round. In St. Louis, he falls ill and is nursed by women from his rooming house. He finds work as a shipping clerk in the cellar of a ladies' dresswear shop, where mandatory overtime stretches days to twelve hours. In his off hours, he hand-prints short stories and mails them to magazines, especially Clay Gladmore's literary journal Frontfire. Gladmore returns many with encouraging personal rejections. One night Chinaski finds a large envelope from Gladmore containing rejected manuscripts and a letter accepting his story "My Beerdrunk Soul is Sadder Than All The Dead Christmas Trees Of The World," his first publication. He reads the acceptance slip over and over, unable to sleep.

Back in Los Angeles, Chinaski meets Laura, a fading blonde with fine legs, who buys him liquor charged to her former lover Wilbur Oxnard. Laura takes Chinaski to Wilbur's house, where Wilbur, a grey-haired, one-armed millionaire whose family accumulated local real estate, holds court with several women. Wilbur asks Chinaski to write the libretto for his opera, but Chinaski agrees and never begins. Days later, after a night of heavy drinking, Wilbur is found dead in his chair. The group scatters permanently.

At a lunch counter, Chinaski meets Jan, a lean, pretty blonde ten years his senior who becomes his girlfriend. She is sexually insatiable in the mornings and volatile at night, throwing household objects during arguments. He works at a bicycle warehouse, but Jan's demands make him chronically late, and the manager fires him. They discover a winning horse racing formula and drive to the track in a battered thirty-five-dollar car. When the streak ends, they are destitute, drinking cheap wine and eating flour-and-water pancakes.

Chinaski gets hired at another auto parts warehouse and meets Manny, an intense Chicano coworker who shares his passion for racing. They begin taking bets from coworkers and pocketing the money. Jan resents the change and begins going to bars alone. One evening Chinaski finds her between two men in a bar, backhands her off her stool, and walks out. He grows lazy at work and is fired. Their lives unravel through drunkenness and legal trouble. At a quarter horse track, in a hallucinatory passage, Chinaski appears to push an old man through the grandstand to the ground far below. The next morning he is convinced he killed the man, but Jan insists they stayed home all day. The race results in the newspaper match his memory exactly, leaving the truth unresolved. He decides to leave Jan, giving her the car and half his money.

The bus to Miami takes four days and five nights. Chinaski cycles through rooming houses and dead-end jobs, including a clothing store where he works as the "extra ball-bearing," a roving employee with no fixed duties. He steals a pair of trousers with extraordinary fabric and is terminated the next morning.

Returning to Los Angeles, he finds Jan working as a hotel chambermaid. They reunite, but their relationship remains volatile. Chinaski churns through jobs: janitor at the Los Angeles Times, where he sleeps on a couch in the ladies' restroom during his shift; packer at a fluorescent light factory; shipping clerk at an art supply store, where he steals expensive brushes; and the "Coconut Man" at a bakery. At the art supply store, he is fired after pursuing a newly hired Japanese woman, acting on a long-held romantic fantasy. At the Hotel Sans, the finest hotel in Los Angeles, he blacks out drunk and corners the assistant manager, lecturing him on hotel operations. When he sneaks to the employee cafeteria after being fired, a sign on the wall reads: "DON'T GIVE ANY FOOD TO HENRY CHINASKI."

Jan leaves Chinaski for Jim Bemis, a real estate operator. Chinaski watches from the hallway as Bemis kisses her and the door closes. He walks away with $2.08. At the Farm Labor Market, he waits among fifty men behind a wire fence for farm work, but the foreman puts a foot on his hand and tells him they have enough. At a day-labor agency on the edge of skid row, he sits drinking port wine with an old Black man who tells him he will have other women and lose them too. Down to thirty-eight cents, Chinaski buys a ticket to a burlesque theater and watches a skinny stripper perform while a band plays desperately. Sitting in the dark, broke and alone, he cannot get aroused.