SOUTH OF NO NORTH

SOUTH OF NO NORTH...escaping the war...Charles Bukowski "He looked at me. I stared down at my feet. He seemed to be reading a sheaf of papers in front of him. It took several minutes. Four, five, six, seven minutes. Then he spoke.
"Listen, I am having a party next Wednesday night at my place. There are going to be doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, actors, all that sort. I can see that you're an intelligent man. I want you to come to my party. Will you come?"
"No."
He started writing. He wrote and he wrote and he wrote. I won­dered how he knew so much about me. I didn't know that much about myself.
I let him write on. I was indifferent. Now that I couldn't be in the war I almost wanted the war. Yet, at the same time, I was glad to be out of it. The Doctor finished writing. I felt I had fooled them. My objection to war was not that I had to kill somebody or be killed senselessly, that hardly mattered. What I objected to was to be denied the right to sit in a small room and starve and drink cheap wine and go crazy in my own way and at my own leisure. I didn't want to be awakened by some man with a bugle. I didn't want to sleep in a barracks with a bunch of healthy sex-mad foot­ball-loving overfed wise-cracking masturbating lovable frightened pink farting mother-struck modest basketball-playing American boys that I would have to be friendly with, that I would have to get drunk with on leave, that I would have to lay on my back with and listen to dozens of unfunny, obvious, dirty jokes. I didn't want their itchy blankets or their itchy uniforms or their itchy humanity. I didn't want to shit in the same place or piss in the same place or share the same whore. I didn't want to see their toenails or read their letters from home. I didn't want to watch their assholes bob­bing in front of me in close formation, I didn't want to make friends, I didn't want to make enemies, I just didn't want them or it or the thing. To kill or be killed hardly mattered."