Screams From the Balcony (32 page)

[To Ann Menebroker]

[Late October 1965]

umm, yes, I am a dog, of course & therefore and forevermore and I have not written but you wouldn’t want me to send you a letter that didn’t walk around on the paper…wouldn’t a half-ass babbling be an insult? we all die and are stuffed with standard formality, and, of course, now that I’ve said this, you have a fine springboard to leap upon me with. Christ, that almost sounds sexy! we have to be careful. at least, you have to. anyhow I just got in from Santa Fe, sick, of course, silly and boozed and nowhere further along anywhere. sure, I remember the good old days when you used to ship me a half dozen 50 cent pieces for one of my books, and enclose a trinket or a rose with eyes, sure sure, and I am the same ass. nothing has altered me. I crash through a headful of shoulders and find myself in a marble bathtub with dirt rings, bell rings, blue rings, red rings, the saliva of myself dribbling into lukey water without goldfish, and the world is shot, and I breathe and wait to die, I breathe and wait for November or Rapid Transit or a young girl sitting on bus stop bench with a lot of leg showing. I drink continually and it keeps me going or it kills me and it doesn’t matter, it is all the same. [* * *]

the old life was very satisfying, of course. Please do not become too relaxed watering plants, baking cookies, putting out the diaper pail to remember the rest. I don’t know exactly what price you are paying for your safety. me, I’m paying a pretty high price for mine and the mirrors turn their backs from me now. I prefer to cover them with towels to spare them the sight of my death. I have joined the walking living dead upon the avenues, in the saloons and everywhere else. but it’s 4 a.m. and the police are driving by and I hear voices outside and we all live very close together here and I am a coward, I am afraid of jails, I hate jails, and so I turn Wagner down a little on the radio, sip my next to last beer and wish you the love of memory and the love of love or whatever there is, dear one.

[To Neeli Cherry]

[?1965]

[* * *] I was in a mellow mood (rare for me) when I wrote the intro to Sherman’s stuff, and I felt a little kind and comradely. It is easier to feel that way when Sherman is at a distance. Outside of the poem form I do not much buy his antics. I believe I made this clear in my poem “Letter from the North.” Yet everything I said in the intro to his poems I said out of the truth of myself, whatever truth I could find. It’s a scurvy word anyhow. Actually I do not think J. writes as well as he used to…never fulfilled the early promise and all that hogwash, except maybe with the poem “Montgomery Street” which I think is a great poem, and if a guy can write a poem like this, I will forgive a lot of his nonsense in actual life.

[To Neeli Cherry]

October 28, 1965

[* * *] my thanks for the emotive “An Invitation,” good flow here. although the truth factor in some lines disturbs me: “to combat all the yellow-bellies who are sucking us dry. and they are, they are.” “but the only alternative is not to fight, and my god! we couldn’t do that.” sounds like you’ve been hornswoggled. if you really think about it, it is the white-bellies who are sucking you dry. but, then, to have a war it is always best to believe you are the Good guy and the other is the Bad guy. it runs more smoothly. death needs help sometimes.

then, too, I think you might have written your lines in jest, in satire, and that I missed the point. [* * *]

[To William Want-ling]

[?1965]

[***] I keep drinking beer and scotch, pouring it down, like into a great emptiness…I admit that there is some rock stupidity in me that cannot be reached. I keep drinking, drinking, am as sullen as an old bulldog. always this way:—people falling down, off their stools, testing me, and I drink them down, down, down, but really no voice, nothing, I sit I sit like some stupid elf in a pine tree waiting for lightning. when I was 18 I used to win $ 15 or 20 a week at drinking contests and this kept me alive. until they got wise to me. there was one shit, though, called Stinky who always gave me a hard go. I’d outpsyche him sometimes by drinking an extra in between. I used to run with these thieves and we were always drinking in a vacant room, a room for rent, with a low light…we never had a place to stay, but most of these boys were tough, carried guns, but I didn’t, still was square, still am. I thought Stinky had me one night and I looked up and he wasn’t there and I went in to heave and I didn’t even heave, there he was in the bathtub, out out, and I walked out and picked up the money. [* * *]

[To William Want-ling]

October 30, 1965

[* * *] It isn’t any secret to myself that I am a rather backward man, lived, baby, but still culling and never sure, always goofed, no answer, and I learn this more and more down at the pits where I work. trying to be one of the boys I will crack wise but it seems to me that I am always topped. christ, the clock is long enough without being topped mentally and spiritually by your fellow-workers. but they always seem to edge me; I get this look of eye and I drop back into silence, once more the defeated asshole, my god. I am always under somebody’s whip. a father. a highschool principal. a fine-looking and lying whore. a bottle. a cigar. a flat tire. rent. a child. rain. constipation. insomnia. a screw at Moyamensing, a trusty in the drunk tank. [* * *]

and yet we learn. there is a whiner down at work. he cries cries but his crying is like some suckerfish, it is not a clean cry and I have listened to all his strickenness, I have listened to hours to years of his mewking and it has taught me—a good man can learn from a good fool. even a not so good man can learn. what I mean is that we all have extremities of unfulfilled wanting. we are toys to whatever has created us. we will never get there, and even if we get halfway, the ending will be the same: smashed cat’s guts on the boulevard or the last drip of sour blood into the bedpan, hurrah!! I mean

 

we’ve got to live with loss like we used to

maybe still do

live with a bad

whore

but

we know all along what it is

we take is standing like Hemingway

or we dismiss it like

Camus

but we know

about it

 

 

this is the way it works and

we wind our clocks and we

wait on

midnight or the carnival

a hamburger sandwich or the

garbage man.

 

 

we live with it we live until we

die.

 

how’s that for hot shit? I throw in free poems that will never be used. I am a truly tough spit baby crying outa a blinkin’ blinking eye thing. [* * *]

 

Want-ling must have requested some quotable aphorisms
.

 

[To William Want-ling]

November 11, 1965

They beat you down with their factories, their booze, their women until you are no longer of any use to them or yourself.

—Bukowski

The trouble with women is that in creating new men they tend to destroy old ones, and you and I know that women are not very good artists.

—Bukowski, again.

[* * *]

I have never met a man that I have truly liked. I have met men that I would drink with, laugh with, fight for—but only in a manner of hope instead of reality.

—B.

I only loved one woman and, unlike all the others, she was the only one who never demanded or asked for the spoken word of it. and even over her grave I said nothing, not even in my head, but the sunlight knew and my shoelaces and [
illegible
].

—B.

[* * *]

I don’t want to play the image of the drunk; it is only that I get so sick of what I remember.

b.

Social consciousness is what keeps me from raping little girls of eleven—that, and the chance of getting caught. Yet I cannot conceive of anybody raping my own little daughter—her eyes are so blue and holy that God himself might awaken to destroy the offender. Yet what keeps us going while we are racking up our own cruelties is the almost certain knowledge (instinct) that God is asleep during our acts. I am as guilty as any, for the desire to act and then not-to-act is the same as acting; the only factor lacking between them being courage, and yet I must beg off at times through a seeming sympathy for an intended victim, which might only be an inbred Christianity or cowardice. The greatest problem is, however, that no intended victim of rape, robbery, murder, the worst of acts, is
innocent
at all—they have all died or slipped or slurred or murdered something themselves along the way—even eleven year old girls. I think that the best principle for a strong man (if I may invent a term?) is not to get involved with the creatures because the creatures are a swamp. There will be certainly enough involvement, without voluntary explorative involvement, to last you a lifetime and to wear you down and kill you before you are 37 years old.

—buk

happy birthday you 32 year old dog [* * *]

[* * *] and we all know about our Great President Honorable Rancho Hot shit Johnson, he talks outa one side of his mouth and shoots a loaded 45 into the back of an innocent man with the other. I go on record that he is a Liar. I’ve met and worked for his types in all the slave mills from Atlanta, Dallas, New York, any city you can name. I hate his face. he is the final great o o o intruder elected to mutilate society at society’s behest. what a hell kind of a democracy is this, that gives you one face, and then gives you the knife?

the United States Government keeps increasing its hardness by the surety of its strength, and it keeps getting harder and harder and tougher and tougher until it is almost like some crazy kind of wart or cancer gone mad. I keep getting the thought that this is happening everywhere in all governments all countries…. christ, we are all so ugly. Is this the meaning of Govts? to get uglier? so, we have the French Rev. which slowly faded back into its cage. and now we have found that even the American Civil War was meaningless…an exchange of ariel courtesies…while the poor black remained the poor free?? black, and even more hollow doughnuts, this Watts strike which I witnessed and work with most of the blacks, even the blacks have conspired into silence, for Christ’s sake, tell them about a few committees, a poverty program wherein not one wino gets 10 cents for a drink of wine, just salaries for officials who have already beat the game by getting into the machine of the game fuck it fuck it. I am lost. and I knew all during the riots that it would be lost…that even the words of the rioters would fall back…. no new world, never. Just the guy on top looking and talking like the guy on the bottom and thinking the same things and the same way. all lost, forever. my hands on a small torn white tablecloth, my white hands, my drink, my cigarette, hoping verily for a wake up of Big Prick God but knowing all along it would not be so. Keep your grenades, 32 year old tough guy, I have done time too, but I guess all our dreams are going to leak out of a salty piss pillow, and I never had no hope and if you think it hard to be 32, you are correct. it is hard to be anything. [* * *]

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[?November, 1965]

 

[* * *] I’ve got to say one thing for
ALL THE WOMEN
I’ve lived with, they couldn’t care less. it’s only when the blade falls and we are sitting out on the street on a piece of cardboard that they seem to question. I remember one of them saying, “But I thought you knew what you were doing!” “Baby, baby,” I told her, “what ever gave you such an idea?” this one I walked South into the city with, she knew somebody—“he’ll let me stay. I only hope he makes his balls quick. I can’t stand the son of a bitch.” I walked her to the door, watched her make up her face, she gave me the sad death kiss and then knocked, “It’s me, Kelly, honey.” and some big fat swine of a businessman, 285 pounds of gold wrapped his arms around her and I walked off. to the streets. I didn’t have a pussy.

the woman is off to her little poetry reading group at his church or other. Neeli Cherry is down there too. he likes to mouth his stuff but they won’t let him read right off. he’s got to suck in. he’ll shoot some mouth tho. I can see Frances now, “And now, I want to introduce Neeli Cherry, editor of the
Black Cat Review
.” and the little butterball, 20 years of him, will try to get up and say something clever. I’ll have them all on my back next Sunday—Neeli, Frances, the kid; I’m going to drive them down to see the Richmond madhouse
EARTH
, if the old car makes it, and I take F. to drive me back. the judge told me last time, “one more drunk driving rap and you might as well measure up for a loose-fitting pinstripe.” only not in that terminology. but I read him, the monster. Neeli keeps telling me, “I don’t care for Richmond’s stuff,” and not being an arguer or a man for detail in vocal transmission, I always give him the same, “Richmond writes some good stuff.” which, of course, is so. Richmond writes a clean and easy and a clear line. all those fuckers write well: Richmond, Cherry, Want-ling, the whole screwy suffering houseful. I just hate to see them scratch each other. well, god damn them anyhow, I travel alone.

scratch, scratch.

very strange happening today. was sitting going over my horses today before going to track, red-eyed, sucking on a beer, shivering, sick with 2 hours overtime and no sleep, sitting in the torn chair by the door and the doorbell rings and here is the mailman with a registered letter from one Heinrich Fett, 547 Andernach a/Rhein, Privoit Strs. 1, Germany. that’s where I was born, sweetheart. what an odd feeling. and here in broken English was a letter from my Uncle (my dead mother’s brother) who said, “By chance I got your address on October 22, 65.” only it was my old address at 1623 N. Mariposa Ave. where I did some good whoring and maybe some good writing too. anyhow, the letter, short and simple, damn near knocked the beer outa my hand, tho not quite. I’ll write him tomorrow and tell him that I am very old and very tired. [* * *]

 

[To Ann Menebroker]

November 17, 1965

 

[* * *] It seems like I’ve written a hell of a lot of drunken letters, maybe more letters than poems, and somebody got the idea it might make a book. Feelers in from some publishers already even tho book is still gathering. I would like your letters—mine to you—included, the best ones, unless you feel that in some of them there was something extra personal. But I have nothing to hide. the letters are yours tho, please do as you wish. I am hoping that you will let them look at most of them, maybe all of them. All letters are returned, of course. Please understand that. and my letters to you are, of course, more personal than to many but I am hoping that anything I said was universal as well as personal. I do hope that you will let them look at most of them? if you do, my more than thanks, of course. for since we have gotten into this thing I would like it to be as complete a selection as possible. [* * *]

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

November 24, 1965

 

[* * *] I haven’t heard from you on the 2 long poems I sent. Please return if they don’t fit you. I have been rejected before. besides, one poem must have a portion
eliminated
anyhow. I remember slamming Eisenhower but since his recent heart attack & obvious decline, I have decided to lay off. no need to attack the sick and the aged—there’s bigger game in the brush.

now must try to get some rest. please forgive tired letter. and again, much thanks, your master job on
Confessions
.

 

[To Ruth Want-ling]

[November 25, 1965]

 

[* * *] no no no, I don’t like snowstorms, I almost died in one, and I am now too old to die. death is only for the young. o christ, forgive me. I keep opening my mouth. you know, I am always in a jam. anyhow, since you know I am an ass, I’ll go on. there was one winter, I think it was in Philly. I am sitting in this very tiny bar and the bartender starts spouting Shakespeare and I am making it with a couple of women in there but this makes me angry, this Shakespeare, so being a blackheart by nature I started bragging on Hitler, Mussolini, so forth, and the next thing I knew I was evicted and instead of being guided to one of the warm pads of one of the whores to be fucked and rolled or maybe just rolled I was walking along in the snow, then stopped and decided to piss against the side of a church. this worked nicely. finished. put it away. then decided on a shortcut across the churchyard. all fine, big moon. ice cold. I have a room somewhere anyhow. I am walking along plenty drunk and then I trip over this wire they have strung across the yard about ankle high. down I go. too drunk to raise up. I lay there knowing I will freeze. I laid there a long time. but it must have been the coldness of the snow on my face that revived me. I got up and made it on in. but, remembering this the next morning, I decided to get out of the snow country and stay out. suicides are desperately vain: they like to choose the time and place. there’s a great difference between dying when you want to and dying when you don’t want to. I know that it amounts to the same thing yet there remains a kind of difference in how the soul or what’s left of the soul enters the earth of the sky or whatever it enters.

listen!!! will you stop this god damned lovely dental technician shit and what great gobs of nicety these dentists…these paid torturers of the haunted human race…are. all other areas of science have moved forward and these fuckers are still working with a pair of pliers. I can’t see a man who wants to be constantly around blood as any kind of decent individual. I’d rather pick up garbage. every dentist I have ever met has had thick wrists, black nazi hair on his arms and an ovaltine belly swarming with the hymns of rats. what lies are you trying to tell me? [* * *]

 

[To Steven Richmond]

Thanksgiving for what? [November 25,] 1965

 

[* * *] if you think f. franklyn’s thing was rough on me, you ought to see what I did to my dear friend John William Corrington when the editor of
Steppenwolf
sent me his latest book of poems
Lines to the South
to read and review. I had praised Corrington’s preceding book of poems but this collection became a complete reversal-automatic poetic poetry. I didn’t know what to do. as you might know, Corrington wrote the foreword to my selection-collection of 8 years’ worth of poetry,
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
. he called me some pretty good things, and here I sat with his latest book of poems in my hands and it didn’t have it, it didn’t even try…I can forgive a lot of bad stuff if a man is swinging from his heels but he was making little cotton muffins. like George Washerbaby, I could not tell a lie. I had to let him have it. I never knew that such assassination lurked within my bowels.
Steppenwolf
will be out after Christmas with its bloody pages. yet really, I think you will find it different than the franklyn. I don’t think it is snitty or below the belt. anyhow, hell. [* * *]

 

[To William Want-ling]

November 29, 1965

 

[* * *] maybe my last letter offended you? remember being drunk as usual but remember mentioning something about a desire to rape eleven year old girls. I said desire, not actuality. in other words, if you had an eleven year old daughter staying with me you might consider her pretty safe, at least a lot safer than with men who won’t admit their desires even to themselves, or if to themselves, then not to the rest of the world. I am not saying that I am anything special but as I say that if you take offense at my naturalism, at that which nature has put into me, then, you are a damn fool. [* * *]

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

December 4, 1965

 

rec.
Ole
3 and see you are still with hammer and sight and selectivity. I always await a downgrading from first issues of enthusiasm but you are only still more there. my thanks for the ads on various books. I am sure my starving, mad editors like them too…. this is my next to last night off until Xmas and I must work eleven and twelve hours each night. hell, of course, sweet hell, but it’s take it or quit the job or get fired and there is nothing in my brain working yet on the perfect escape. yet I have hustled my horse-race figures over and over and now the madman says (Buk), “with my method of play, I can average $500 a week with a straight $10 flat bet on win.” I’ve put in hours and hours of work and on this thing and it would be some laugh if it were true! it’s true on paper, at any rate, and almost frighteningly logical, and my job is to follow my scientific papers instead of emotion or hysteria or so forth. you get out there and some ass spills beer on your shirt, somebody steps on your shoes, you glance up and see a man staring at you with a mountain of immense hatred; you look around and here is some gal sitting on a bench with her skirt pulled up around her ass. you take a good swig from the flask Nash sent you, the one Hemingway drank out of, so it’s good enough for me, maybe not good enough. anyhow, what I am trying to say is that a lot of things get in the way of pure paper theory, and it takes guts to continues to follow a straight central line, esp. when a losing streak occurs. and
EXACTLY
when you
JUMP OFF, IT COMES IN AT VERY GOOD ODDS
. I am going to stay on the line, listen, what has this got to do with the good
Ole
? I worked eleven hours last night, so make that an excuse. listening to a Rossini opera. I can see why they failed. all his operas sound like his overtures, and an over. and the meat of an opera
are
different things.