Screams From the Balcony (21 page)

 

“
Nash,” mentioned in the next letter, was Jay Nash, who, Bukowski notes, “ran the underground newssheet
, The Chicago Literary Times.”
He had published Bukowski’s
Run With the Hunted
in his Midwest Poetry Chapbooks series in 1962. Bukowski notes that he was “obsessed with Hemingway and the twenties
.”

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[late April 1965]

[* * *] I don’t see how
Ole
gets around so much. I hear on the phone. 2 guys knocked on the door and brought me beer. all the same thing: “I read your article in
Ole
.”

on
Confessions
, of course, I’m glad you accept. actually it’s going to destroy a lot of
IMAGE
that has been built up and it’s going to make me freer to move around. yes, I know that any section could be extended, and there were more acts to add, I think of them now: the gang of fascists who carried guns, screamed heil Hitler!, drank wine; hanging posters in New York subways; coconut man in a cake factory; the colored maid with big legs who fucked me in a St. Louis hotel; a Fort Worth redhead; myself insane in Dallas and more more more, the things that happen to almost everybody while they are waiting for the executioner.

but look, on doing the novel sort of thing something holds me back. maybe it hasn’t jelled, maybe it seems like work, maybe dropping poems off the tips of my elbows is easier. technical point—in
Confessions
I have a place in the slaughter house scene—I think I say something like, “The Negroes rolled up the wheelbarrows, they were painted a white, a kind of chicken-shit white” or some such line. I remember thinking of correcting it but forgot. I mean the people might think the Negroes were painted a chicken-shit white. should read something like: “The Negroes rolled up the wheelbarrows. the barrows were painted a—” or let it go the original way. who cares? [* * * ]

word from Nash who also sent a flask Hemingway took a slug from, and now it’s mine, a nice gift, and it will see use, good use, and Nash also says that he is going to bring out
Cold Dogs
by the end of this month—which to me, means in a couple of months. This is in response to a ten page drunken letter I printed out via hand to him. at least it did appear to rattle buried bones, finally.
Crucifix
now (see Webb and Lyle-Stuart) is being collated and it won’t be long at all, and someday too I will get
Confessions
, and hang it up there on the top row of ye old bookcase with the rest. I don’t feel so much like a writer as I do like somebody who has slipped one past, and I guess my detractors would agree with this. I feel like Warren Spahn squeezing out just one more for the lousy Mets, or like the dice are hot but it’s gotta end. of course it will. I’ll peel and die like old paint, hurrah, but anyhow I have been gifted with not ever having had any first-class fame, and this has allowed me to go on writing the way I please to write. I’ve been lucky, no one can have been any luckier. look, I’ll be 45 in August, think of it. no guns have killed me and I have not been suckered into any beliefs. uh, just think of standing in a kitchen and pulling up a shade with 45 years on you and letting in the sunlight, thinking of the stockpile crashed behind you, thinking, I might even some day be 65, peering from slits of eyes like a grey tank and pulling at a tiny bottle of whiskey and lighting a
WINSTON
and watching the blue smoke curl curl climb the air, and still feeling bad, and taking it, wearing an old green sweater with moth holes and knowing death is very close as the young girls sing in the streets and literary and political giants have risen and exploded and disappeared.

the Vietnam thing is in the papers every night and the govt. keeps sending over more planes, bombs, troops, battleships, and, of course, I don’t understand it, I haven’t understood any of the wars, I only know that I am always told the enemy is a big bad guy and unless we show him constant muscle and boldness I am told, he’ll someday be in the doorway finger-fucking our wives, but all that I do know is that after the clearing of one war we immed. pump up another, and after you see the same picture book again and again you know that it’s only a nightmare train always getting ready to run off the tracks, and you neither fight it, accept it or forget it; you ride along hoping the thing holds to the rails a little longer, hoping for one more beer in a peeling kitchen while listening to Haydn, hoping the enemy has sense and forbearance instead of what we’re told he has, and the newsboys hawk the crazy news as our wives burn the toast, think of other things like changing diapers and nose drops, of going to a Sunday’s church or wanting a drive down the coast to inhale the turd-filled ocean. but the car’s too old and the spirit’s tired: forget it, baby, I want to sit in here and just drink tonight. what again? again. Blazek’s wife brings him beer. why don’t you bring me beer? no, I don’t want a boiled egg. listen, what do you think of this Vietnam thing?

Lewis Mumford said long ago that there wouldn’t be any atomic war. that we would only live under the shadow of fear for some decades, perhaps for the rest of the century.

how in the hell can Lewis Mumford say that? how does
he
know? as long as there isn’t an atomic war he sounds right. when one happens nobody will care whether he is right or not. [* * *]

[To Tom McNamara]

May sicks, 1965

writers are a sick-head lot, a gathering of neon-light tasters, spitting out their words, their absurdities, their bile, their orange-juice blood. we are down in submarines; we don’t know; a nervous nasty lot…

I’d rather sleep for 3 or 4 days than do anything, so what happens? I can’t sleep at all. I worry about motor tuneups and the death of sparrows. and all the women walking around and me not fucking them. then, sometimes I think I am too much topsoil, I want to get under, forget the toteboard and gambol with the worms (later, I know), so the other night I am wandering around at 4 in the morning and I pick up something by a Chinaman, 300 or 200 B.C., a couple of centuries after Confucius, and here’s this guy running around giving the word to Dukes and State Ministers and Kings, but it doesn’t reach me, I don’t have any armies or loyal subjects or disloyal subjects, only a matter of keeping myself alive another 15 or 20 years if I feel like it. more wasted time. now I’ve got a pain under the collarbone; I’ve been going a pack and a half but my pecker is hard when I awaken the few times I’ve slept. I am angry with white Spanish walls and sound of tires on the pavement. no, I don’t read much anymore—Donleavy, anybody. it’s a matter of the juices saying no, no, no. no. there’s simply no intake. if I power it down against the grain I am deader than I am now and that wd. be some horrible thing, ah.

I hear Lyle Stuart is going to charge $7.50 for
Crucifix in a Deathhand
, my new book of poems. It has expensive paper, format, plates of artwork and so on, but I can’t see anybody paying $7.50 for a book of poems, and he has 3,000 books of poems, and so I guess he’s going to have to stack them wall to wall and forget it. most of the people, I think, who might go my poems, most of them don’t even have $7.50 and if they did they’d prob. buy something to drink. well, I write the stuff and what they do with it is theirs. the paper is supposed to last 800 years or 1800 years I forget which and I don’t know, except one bomb or bad poetry will take care of all that.

Your New Bohemia sounds a little disturbing, and it might well disturb the shopkeepers of the Village if the tourists get the buzz. I remember when I was in the Village so long long ago, 25 years ago?, I happened to read in the paper that O. Henry hung out in this certain place and did his writing on the table down there. so I went on in, down the steps and looked around. red tables. nobody there. I thought, O. Henry must have been a fool. I walked up to the bar and ordered a drink and the bartender said, “Sorry, sir, I can’t serve you.” I didn’t ask him why. I was sober. but it made me feel filth as if he smelled some inner stink in me, and I had been feeling mad, thinking suicide, maybe I looked too ugly, too vile. anyhow, I did not like the place, drink or no drink. then down in New Orleans a month or so ago I am walking along with the editor and he takes me through this kind of sidewalk cafe place and he said Hemingway and Faulkner and Tennessee Williams used to hang out here at one time or another. a real commercial hole it was, and I thought, these guys must have been crazy. jammed with tourists and conceited waiters. I told the editor that those writers must have been nuts. and he said, well, they were drunk.

that still didn’t help too much.

there’s a lot I don’t understand but this is standard. when I wipe my ass I guess I understand that this is something that should be done. and I understand that I should not go out on the streets naked there might be lions out there. Vietnam, hitler, caesar, the falling of boards from roofs I do not understand.

do you know something? I am getting sleepy. maybe I ought to go to sleep?

there are days of too much of the same and in the whole human mass not an eye or a face or a voice or a sound. Only a frog under a bush. only a cat crossing a street. a street without tits. graveyards. books on mathematics. chalk for lunch. madhouses. farmers. fish. meatballs. manure. sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

[To Douglas Blazek]

May 20, 1965

[* * *] the woman is standing here beating a big spoon around inside of a water jug, now she’s ripping cardboard, banging refrigerator, sniffling, snuffling, now she’s making coffee, now the kid suddenly screams, more bangs, these walls are so close, refrigerator again, now she lifts a wet rag and carries it across the room like a sleepwalker…they are pouring it to me
BLAZ
!!!

30 minutes to go before work and I am trying to get this letter off to you

DO YOU WANT ANOTHER COOKIE
? I hear her voice say.

fuck it. we march on. an angel will give me a hand-job in the year 1986. it doesn’t matter. [* * *]

little incident last night, foreman saw me standing talking to another man. this is against the rules. he rushed up. we have little slips we carry that show the amount of work we have done. he rushed up and I jammed the slips into his belly.

I’m leaving, I told him.

what?

I’m sick.

huh?

I’m sick of working.

what do you mean?

my 8 hours are up.

I saw you standing there talking…

my 8 are up.

why didn’t you tell me?

add me up.

then the jackass runs to another minor wheel and says, I saw Bukowski standing there and talking to that man…

well, says the other guy, his 8 hours are up.

I walked past and out. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything except that these babies are all sucked out and I don’t like to talk to them or even look at them, especially near the end of the night. [* * *]

 

The book of poems announced here was ultimately published not by Mad Virgin Press but by Poetry X/Change, Glendale, California. It did not appear in print until 1968. The book of “mostly drawings” was never published
.

 

[To Tom McNamara]

May 20, 1965

strike for freedom of time to have a look around. they have caught me. it’s a sad and silly story of doing-in but the main thing is they’ve got me. 8 years on the same job and just as broke as if I were not working. Of course, the first years were the slippery days when they had a hard time finding me; when I could sit and watch the smoke rise from my cigarette while men were killing each other. and men continue to kill each other and themselves and they’ve cut a lot of woodwork and a pile of soul from me. there are a hell of a lot of ways to die but I still have a finger on the ledge, I think.

something called
THE MAD VIRGIN PRESS
wants to do a book of my poems and I don’t know if it will be mimeo or what and I don’t care. they say ten percent, and I can always use a little beer money. I think I have a title—
Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window
. I will try it on them and see what they say. Then Border Press is going to come out with a book of mine, mostly drawings interspersed with poems, but I haven’t done the thing yet, but will. I like to play with india ink and lots of white paper. I tried some oils one time but what a strain—like going for the 3rd piece of ass. so what I mean, here I am sagged and dying but still fumbling with poems and drawings, and it’s a way of going on—like the whiskey and the horses and sleep sleep sleep, if I can get it.

this is an indrawn and particularly kind of cotton and waiting time, faucet dripping, something on the radio 200 years old, the teeth falling out of my head, horns honking, children pissing down their legs in a May afternoon, and below us pipes underground passing the shit to the sea, and the morgues stuffed, men in stained neckties selling ass, more books on Kennedy, myself barely feeling it out—the flailing, the words, the trees, the whores, the ways, Time battering like a tough fullback &, Ace, I do not mean the magazine. smoking cigars and dreaming of Mata Hari. ducking under sparrow droppings. I saw a lizard yesterday. also read a quotation by E. E. Cummings in the newspaper yesterday that I didn’t like. all in all, you gotta figure a newspaper is a bad buy because it can make you terribly unhappy and you even have to pay a dime to get that way. Berlioz. somebody writes and asks if I want to read somewhere. I have to tell him no. it’s true I don’t want to. snails don’t do much for me. I have these pains in my shoulders, neck, back, and I walk as if I were mortar. topside. only the tigerlegs kid with the moth-soul. when it rains I cry like Mortons’ salt.