Screams From the Balcony (31 page)

wish me luck, baby, wish me everything; I am sad, I got the blues the blues the green blue purple blues. my my my.

[To Al Purdy]

October 11, 1965

[* * *] people keep sending me poems and novels to read and collections of poesy—I mean people I have never written to or heard of—and all the stuff is bad, bad, bad. I wonder if you realize how much bad stuff is written in all earnestness? and they’ll keep right on with it. thinking that they are undiscovered genius. I rec. a beautifully printed book of poems, fine paper, hardcover, and inscribed “to Buk…” and etc. an honor, sure, but I can’t even write this person and thank him because the poems are so flat and drivelling that they are not even bad—they don’t even exist. if you know the type I mean. yet I don’t throw a book away when it is sent to me in this way and I don’t know what to do with them. I guess there’ll be another one in the mail tomorrow. there are a lot of dead men sitting at typewriters. I would have quit long ago but when I saw the truly bad stuff that was being done, I couldn’t let go. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

October 23, 1965

[* * *] it has been 100 degrees for 3 or 4 days and everybody smells like shit and everybody is, of course. in from track, medium day, plus $32. the human race is an empty egg out there. the crowd is a dog made of sausage. I could not think of fucking or singing out there, or dreaming; only murder.—now back in the trough: cigar, beer, old hat bit. my guts are dropping out and I sit here pecking at the keys like a propped-up Hemingway with matchstick soul. and the typer seems shot. hope you can read.

back from Santa Fe, ya. [* * *] I was sick most of the time I was there but did hunk down quite a bit of beer and scotch and got into a little trouble. Webb always flips a bit when the image does not fit the peg but I can’t be bothered. one night I was quite drunk and locked out in the icy rain and knocking on doors but nobody wanted to let me in. somebody finally relented and gave me a long angry speech. shit on that. my father is dead. I am dead. [* * *] I got on the train and my foot began to swell. I walk around barefoot when drunk and all the glass and steel I had picked up decided to play death. I found a sadist doctor when I got into town and he sliced my heel open and dug and probed and dug. no shot, of course. German accent: “Vell, vell, you took it like a man!” “You enjoyed it more than I did,” I told him. “Nine, nine! you see I vuz only interested in seeing vat was in dere, I did not enjoy…” “make out the bill.” and that, was Santa Fe. [* * *]

the average person has largely and finally already left the earth, my friend. they generally leave about the age of 5, although some stay a bit longer. tough for you, mother, but you are still here. your letters and poems get better, better, as I shrivel up into bologna-string walking. have you ever seen a bologna-string walking? Death is 2 balls without a head. Death is not being able to possess a good woman because I am dirty from factories and alleys and sluggings and hospitals and marriages and shackjobs, and poor, poor, poor, poor crippled dirt. wine bottles, nights of a steaming light bulb, scribbling on little slips of paper and unable to read them in the morning or at noon or ever.

 

death is all this waiting without screaming

death is bread rotting in the heat

and 90 million rats and roaches

death is a sea of piss

death is a sophisticated afternoon in Santa Fe

with nobody saying what they are thinking

 

maybe it’s the heat, kid, I am really snarling through these thin rented cardboard walls. how much separates me from the loony bin? sometimes down at work I feel like slugging somebody. no hatred, only the zero complex. I want to bust something. sometimes it happens by itself. same thing happened to somebody that happened to me in 53 or 54 or whenever it was. the belly broke open and the blood came out, out, out. he was dead by the time he reached the hospital. the bad life. I whine before I turn out the lights; I pray for spastics and dwarfs, Pal, I pray for scrub women, Pal, I pray for frightened women of some seeming beauty who play their hand and exchange one rich man for a richer man. I pray for the nail that enters the hand that enters the wood, I pray that that nail may not be rusty. Pal.

a couple of old wrinkled-up women down at work are trying to fuck me. they know that I am whipped. one of them has a young girl’s ass and legs but she must be a thousand years old. “I am getting a new Mustang. will you teach me how to drive?” “I’ll drive you, baby, I’ll drive you!!” “he, hehe, hehehe, that’s what I thought! an’ I want ya ta meet my sister too!” looks like I gotta fuck the whole family. I’ll probably pass. it’s a hairy drippy drizzling game. it’s only when I get drunk that I imagine that I am the lover. what nonsense. and Rupert Brooke wrote better too. but he didn’t have any sense and decided to go to war. and try to be lucky. bullets are built for poets. I knew this one guy, not a bad writer or human being either (sometimes there’s a difference) who said, “But suppose some stupid cocksucker points a machinegun at me and squeezes the trigger?” “if you go, he will.” he went—it happened. m.g. slugs. but they’ll always find an excuse for another war, that’s all right. but they’ll bust you for a little game of pot. or jail a whore for selling her pussy. or blame a homo for being a homo. or fire a man for being 10 minutes late to work. or jail you for being drunk on the streets. or run a woman out of the country for not believing in God (Mad Murray) and saying so and getting them to ban prayer in schools because she figured the kids should have a choice. but War? stockpiles? shit??? why not? listen, I don’t mean to preach here but a little drunk a little tired—up all night at work and then the racetrack today and now almost midnight, no sleep, so the seams ripping a bit.

something on from the Three Penny Opera. Brecht does not help me too much. I do not trust his melodrama; a god damned horse thief. the social structure bit. I mean, he holds a good hand…

the little girl runs up and pokes me with her finger. I sit in my shorts. “uts
DAT
?”

“dat’s fat.”

“uts
DAT
?”

“dat’s my bellybutton.”

…because he speaks plainly, that’s a good thing, but he turns it on too much. there are other basics besides a Jewish nose. clarity of delivery can trap you as much as obtuseness because you can kid yourself that you always
seem
to know what you are saying. (See Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings.) but I know a lot of guys down at work who have a plain clarity of delivery and they never say anything.

tell me, Blaz, do you think the dead get hard-ons?

do you think the worms and maggots will ever crawl the body of your Love in that closet down there in the dark? what did that fly mean? why did it affect me? why all the sunlight? and the horse standing under the tree? will I live another ten years? [* * *] a siren goes now, ambulance, then fire trucks earlier, the town is on fire, and earlier today coming in from the track I drove thru the Negro section of the x-riots and they were shining their cars and sitting on their steps, they’d had their drunk, and now it was back to it. my god, not a chance for any of us. white or black, living or dying, we are snot, driven helpless snot before a brainless moon of God. seesee, see the Martini Life! the homes in the hills! 14 bathrooms, 17 fireplaces, & 7 great muddy garages while buying 2 more homes over the telephone, one with a winding staircase marvelous like a lighthouse thing for your guests to fall down drunk upon after drinking their
own
liquor.

well, 6 more bottles of beer and then to sleep, maybe. [* * *]

now they play the Blue Danube and I snap the radio off.

now everybody is here in the kitchen and the whole kitchen is hollering. they talk about making
OATMEAL
! don’t say that I don’t properly feed these broads.

so we go on. no death in the road. no Nobel. 5 bottles of beer. a typer that wobbles on 3 legs and wants to kick off. my my. there goes a fly. [* * *]

I am spreading wall to wall, fat and stupid, hardly feel the pain-translate it mostly, I do, into shots of blue and green light. a formula. I didn’t mean to lay it on you, baby. I remember the bit about (who was it?) Flaubert telling DeMass to keep on clerking, practice on his writing and not to become a journalist. so de Mop clerked and Flub wrung his hands in the light of his (Flaubert’s) fame. sometimes I think it might have been to remove competition? anyhow, DeMop took it out on his rowboat and mad he went because of the siff and mostly because of clerking, although they won’t admit that. [* * * ]

there is a poet-novelist who said, “Bukowski worries about his soul.” this is too pat of course and puts em in a neat box. but I have packed the meat on my shoulder and have seen the threads come out of statues. I don’t need a soul; all I need is a light bulb, some beer and a chair to sit in. but some want to take that from me. now I have been shipped the poet-novelist’s latest book of poems and I am supposed to review the bit for a mag. I don’t know what to do. it looks very much as if my friend has not worried about
his
soul. christ, how we snipe! should I shoot him down? we are all a bunch of bitches. dying is often a slow process. why rack a man because his poems have started to fail anymore than rack a man because his eyesight is failing or his teeth falling out or his pecker failing to get hard? we gotta have a winner, what? yet, in another sense, there are some men who sell too easy; one second a man is his brother’s keeper and the next second he is Brutus. [* * *] then too, you might figure it this way: a real man is gonna lose his teeth his hair and his balls long before the soul??? it is confusing. yet I keep looking at faces, I keep watching ways things are done. I’m no Virgin. I’ve rolled and been rolled and yet, in a certain sense, there is just so far that you ought to go, just so much that you should do. I don’t speak of morality and code—that jazz has held the world back too long. I speak of simple things, although I can’t say just what they are but you know them when they come upon you. Genet’s seeming immorality and depravity are nothing of the sort. because he is neither depraved nor immoral toward himself. he does what is proper toward himself. the greatest immorality is going for gold against the grain of yourself when you don’t need the gold, the possession—like taping dead oranges on an orange tree. of course, most of us figure we need some of the gold. there’s always an excuse to die: the wife, the baby, the girlfriends; there is always an excuse to go to the cowardice that most men are naturally inherent to because his father was inherent to it and his father’s father etc. there’s always an excuse to be a prick. it even seems clever. graft. babes with long legs and tights pussies. new cars. then often immorality and immortality lock legs and you’ve got jism all over the bed. Oxford. grants. lectures, poetry readings. mouth, mouth, mouth. we are sucked forever into the traps. I’ve always found the face and the ways and the honesty of a ditch digger more alive than any English prof. of course, nowadays even the ditch diggers are getting sophisticated. trouble everywhere. what am I saying? I’ve lost the string. good. good, then. [* * *]

catch? fine, the critics say that I am non-cerebral. I think the same thing of them. I think that they are patsies to the dupe, playing some kind of con-game, not because I
don’t
understand their words but because I do. they and Grandma may call it carnal but I call it wet pussy and prostitution. I am as cerebral as any of them (at least so) and if they want to talk about Government or God or Plato or the Meaning of Man, or any of those useless things, have them pour me a couple of glasses of bourbon and I’ll take them up alleys they’ve never seen and roll them out of their minds. Everything is basically simple—especially the critics, especially my critics. and, thus, having unloaded this load of come I move on to other things.

do you think, my son, that I will ever get a job teaching Creative Writing at the University of Columbia? I would very much like to fuck some young coeds or have
them
fuck me. [* * *]

I guess that so many problems come in upon a man that he finally dismisses them all and becomes a rock, the world is full of rocks. but the beer goes down down down. Wagner’s
The Ring
on now. Wagner goes good with me. Shostakovich. the Russians, the German in the Arts. The French, the English, the Spaniards do me little good. the Italians, halfway. why is it? of course, there’s Knut Hamsun. Norway? wherever the hell. [* * *]

 

Kirby Congdon was editor of
Magazine (
New York). A letter from Bukowski appeared in no. 3 (see below
).

 

[To Tom McNamara]

October 25, 1965

[* * *] have you ever met Kirby Congdon? he seems bright enough to set torches to the world. almost seemingly classical, yet lived, and learned, and not to be bullshitted. I understand he is going to Key West or somewhere. there are so many good people I’d like to get drunk with, not so much as to talk myself, but to see them sitting in chairs and talking. Each man seems to come up with something good, something to make me laugh, and they do it so easily and with grace and honesty. Christ I am a pig, Mac, so often so tight, so often so untrusting.

if I could only realize that right now there are at least 1,000 people on earth better than Christ was; I mean, if Christ was not a fable; I mean, people who don’t do tricks like raising the dead and being glorious and so forth. these people stay hidden. they know that contact means the plague, this is what disgusts me with the Ginsberg/Corso mob. they suck to the human adulation bit and are soon swallowed. Corso died rather quickly because his only mainstay was a simplicity of purpose and some type of message that he thot important. It has taken Ginsberg a little longer, but he is swallowing the same bloody bait—via Behan, via D. Thomas. The woman here is full of words and the child runs around. but I am still insane. She says Thomas drank himself to death because he felt his talent was waning. Bullshit. Thomas drank himself to death for the same reason that I do: he loved his drink, it lifted him where he belonged, where we all belong, where we all should be if the stream of people weren’t such asses and didn’t believe in homes and new cars and all that junk. I have almost died of drink several times, once very close, it was sweet and didn’t matter, and they finally stood me up and walked me out of a door to do it again. fuck em. I am ready to die. I am ready to wilt. [* * *]