Screams From the Balcony (42 page)

 

Allen DeLoach edited
Intrepid
magazine from Buffalo, N. Y. Bukowski was a contributor
.

 

[To Allen DeLoach]

February, 1967

[* * *] poetry is survival, sir. it throws some of the stink bombs out of my room. if it comes as rhythm fine or physic, fine, any old way. I think of it more as a loaf of bread, a long fat hot loaf, sliced in half down the middle, spread with pickles, onions, meats, garlic, chilies, old fingernails…add ice beer and a shot of scotch, ram it down under electric light, forget the mountains of faces and eyes and wrinkles and bombs and rent and graves, get it in, warm, smelling, filling, light a cigar, blow the whole room paint the whole room blue with smoke, play the radio, think of the bones of Chopin’s left foot—that to me, is poetry, or zingplay, or the rays. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

February 29, 1967 [?]

[* * *] here I seem to be going through AN
INTERVIEW STAGE
, kind of a silly treadmill but while going through it I try to talk as straight as possible but I suppose many men going through the same figure they are talking straight too. you never know quite when you’re dying but you can get the feeling of it. I’ve felt quite a few death rays lately. [* * *] I’ll send you copies unless you’d rather not see them; I mean they might make you sick: after all, I am a monster almost of your own creation. the Bukowski Vogue, one of them asked me, it’s the Bukowski Vogue, what do you think of the Bukowski Vogue? I don’t remember what I answered but I do hope my answer took some of the pin curlers out of his hair.

the idea remains the same. I am attempting to work with the poem; I am attempting to stay alive. I find it easier to work with the poem than to stay alive. all these interviews are beside the point. the typewriter is still there when I run a sheet of paper into it and I sit there and I begin again. there isn’t any background. there isn’t any cheap excuse. [* * *]

Marina growing growing and we are closer than the grass and the earth. it is a very good feeling, an easy feeling. no trouble, no strain. loose and free; creative without fanciness; real without flags.[* * *]

the novel
The Way the Dead Love
has stopped at chapter 5, but no problem. easy to write. about this skid row hotel I lived in for 2 years. it’s just a recording of the people, and all the scenes come to me that I have forgotten, they all come up on the paper as I write. it’s like being reborn, living it again. very strange. have been on gambling horse-binge which has eaten up my time. but no problem. a free day or so and I have 5 or 10 more chapters. chapters very short but filled with the distillation of the action. best this way. less yawns. [* * *]

[To Carl Weissner]

March 24, 1967

well, shit, a little high, nothing new. well, anyhow, John Thomas said he would airmail tape I did of my poetry—airmail—so you should have it by the time you get this, or very soon. friend, it is almost 2 hours to me reading my swillsteak business. not partkclary from any area, just what my hands reached or what was easy or consumable or felt like it. I didn’t realize that I had read so long but had been drinking a bit and taking down these strange colored pills (not
LSD
), not really
VERY
high, only in a passable stage of
FITS
. I mean, time was a dishpan. it didn’t matter. I read straight through, I
believe
, without a stop. most of the poems I had forgotten, didn’t know the next line, intonation, connection, but feel really this was for the good rather than the bad because it stopped me
FROM SETTING UP ONE LINE TO FIT THE NEXT
. this is important, I believe. tho it may not be. I don’t know. I know less and less—and feel much better for it. I think, tho, I am not sure—that the tape is on 4-track. you got a 4 tracker machine? I think this means you play the same reel through twice? anyhow, instructions are on box tape came in? aren’t they? what drab stuff, this talk! only I always get mixed up on presumptions. I don’t want to mix anybody up. I mean, people always presume that
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY KNOW. YOU ASK THEM THE WAY TO THE NEAREST WHOREHOUSE
. they say, 2 blocks left, one right, see this barbershop, ask for sam, he’ll send you to clean cheap pussy. so what
HAPPENS? YOU GET THERE
and there are
THREE
barbershops! and each barber is named
SAM
. you run back on in and get flogged across the asshole with a rusty windjammer rainbow clamstink frozen loaf of russian rye bread embedded with toy tots singing, “somethin’s happenin’ and you don’t know what it is, do you mista Jones???” [* * *]

by the way I have an idea of tape mutation intervolving thing but in an rear-area of my own gone gnome tot-process which is: tape mutation or word formage in symphonic or rhythmic breakthru. I have the patterns already processed on paper, the music notes, and hope that I have not [* * *] tipped my beerhand as I would like to try it first, and if I can explain to Thomas’ thick head what I would like to do or change or forward or backward after listening to your Coleridge/Burroughs, Weissner tape, I think I could show you boys where you have missed a lot of chances and natural pluses. I don’t want to hurt you Carl, you’ve done anything but put warts in my bloodstream and I want to thank you for the tape, which was very good in the first interfolding part, but you had too much help somewhere, you were too staid self-conscious arty too Burroughs really. all right, shit, I know he is a genius and I am ejalulative [
sic
] jealous, fine. what I mean is: both you genuine cats getting up too tight and kind of reading it off of paper, breathing tight, tight kitties, good kitties, but not letting loose with who you are as loaf of bread or something shitting; I don’t
MEAN THE ARTISTRY OF WHAT WAS SAID WAS BAD, THAT
WAS
ART
, I mean the Artistry of
DOING IT FAILED AS TOO TIGHT AND TOO HOLY
. now the Gysin thing at the end was at the other extreme: too highschool and not enough holy Art. if you fuckers could only mix the 2 extremes you’d be in on target, and isn’t that the only place to be? check with Norse on what I am saying. he won’t lie to you even if it means the room rent. he’s too inbred now. there’s no out. ask him. but don’t get pissed if he agrees with me. you won’t. that’s why I write to you. that’s why I write to you straight. even tho we are all more sensitive—no matter how we act—than a female cat’s asshole or pussy or wherever those ramrod hair ends scream into the
NIGHT: YOYYOWWW
[* * *] my thanks, still, for tape. It was good, don’t let me mix you up. My thanks. But would like to send you my mozart—cadillac intermix soon. don’t be pissed. You won’t be. [* * *]

oh, christ carl, it’s good friday, my radio keeps playing these Mozart things when he was starving under shit church supported poverty and really throwing curve balls but the church only thot of it as bad music. it’s like Blake, Blake was about as much a religious poet as some whore leaning down to suck purple dick for an extra dollar a mouthful. when the final breakthru is reached we are all writing about the same thing in different tonalities, and you know this, this is no great statement, we are tired of great statements. great statements are made by great liars. Christ had a big mouth and maybe a big ass. who know? if there were more paintings of Christ’s ass (I don’t know of any) than all these of His face, maybe I could go it.
YOU SEE, THE FACE HAS LEARNED TO RECHRISTEN ITSELF IN THE FORM, SKIN, FEATURE, OUTLAY AND APPEARANCE NECESSARY FOR IT TO SURVIVE
. it is out front. a sign. not hidden, but certainly hazardous.
MAN HAS NOT YET FOUND OUT HOW TO MASK HIS ASS
. I am not being funny, Carl. what I mean is that I can follow any person a few feet (man or woman) and watch them walk, watch the balancing of the mounds—I know almost everything about them.
AND WHEN THEY LEARN TO MASK THE ASS AND THE WALK I WILL GO TO THE LEFT ELBOW
. you see? [* * *]

 

Tompkins Square Press was run by Tom McNamara. The book of letters was not published. The anticipated third visit to the Webbs, now in Tucson, took place at the end of June
.

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

April 2, 1967

[* * *] I have
ANOTHER NEW SYSTEM ON HORSES THAT I HAVE FIGURED OUT
. this
may
be it, haha, ha. Frances and Marina gone someplace for a week. I miss M. guess that’s why I got the blues. she lights things up for me and although she has not worked her way into many of my poems, she is still very much there, ya.

I think Tompkins Square going to do a book of my letters, the drunk ones, I guess. the drunk ones are best. anyway, I got a feeler from them. they say early 68. I’d like to read my damned letters. this is the only way I’ll ever be able to do it. [* * *]

well, I’ve had 2 wild visits with you—the one in New Orleans and the one in Santa Fe, and if I can work this one out I hope that it goes smoother, to hell with dramatics. but Jon you are a tough guy to get along with, and what makes it worse is that I am a hard-head.
I DON’T GET ALONG WITH ANYBODY
. if I come down I think I will only stay a week, it will be about all I can afford—unless the horses are good to me. this is the weirdest system you ever heard of, yet it works like machinery—on paper. anyhow, if I come down I think it best if you let me look for my own room. I like a place where I can close a door. the New Orleans setup was all right except I was pretty jumpy. sick most of the time, and all those pages to sign. 3100 pages! jesus, you realize what a JOB that was? with silver ink? where’s my boyscout medal? yeah, it’s a shame Stuart doesn’t know how to handle
Crucifix
. I’m real disappointed in his methods, but he did ship me $200.00 when I needed it bad, so I can’t write that off. god, this time last year I was sitting on my bloody ass, right after the operation, and here we sit around now, all of us, still alive. [* * *]

[To Ann Menebroker]

April 7, 1967, 3:45 a.m.

Have been drunk for several many hours. trouble controlling pen. [* * *]

Your voice always sounds young as clear rivers crying clear things, no matter what you say, no matter what you say, I feel ice-joy cry in your voice.

But please don’t feel sad. I think that
I am something that has just gotten into your head
. I am neither that way or that true.

if you could see me now, baggy-bellied in torn shorts, old, drunk, trying to answer a letter in the half-light of my life, then you would know.

there is hardly anything literary about me nor many either, so there you go.

writing poems is such a chicken-shit game! if we were only more alive like they are more dead! then, sweets, we could
finally
write.

 

About this time Bukowski began his series of columns for Bryan’s new underground paper
, Open City,
under the series title “Notes of a Dirty Old Man
.”

 

[To Carl Weissner]

April 28, [1967]

[* * *] right now I guess you are hurting worse than I am, but you we
ARE ALL JUMPY
, cool and tired and hardly caring but at the same time—
AT THE EXACT SAME TIME
—jumpy. I mean when I did not hear from you, I figured first that

a; you were sick

b; you had injured yourself

c; you had killed yourself

then I figured second that the tape was bad, that I had insulted you with the tape or that I had insulted you with some criticism of your tape, that I had
TOUCHED SOME SPOT ON YOU AND THAT YOU WERE PISSED
. the reason this type of thought-trend mangles me is through the experience that it has happened very often. so the brain cells say—“oh, there it goes, it has happened again.” there were you with your head cracked like an ostrich egg with a sledgehammer and I am sitting around sticking false needles into my hairy ass ego. even in a long three page letter to Greg the Dan I explained how this so often happens to ME in this world. poor pure ivory me. like it even went on when I was a kid in school.

“WIPE THAT SHIT SNEER FROM YOUR FACE AND GO STAND IN THE HALL! DAMN RIGHT, AND FOR AN HOUR, NO LESS, NO MORE, YOU WILL STAND IN THE HALL
!”

I never knew what those teachers were talking about. really. to me my face just felt a little blank. I was not much interested in what was being said most of the time, but who was? to be sent out into the hall because of something about my face made me feel monstrous, inferior, spat upon. excluded, and
STUPID STUPID STUPID
. and I would get up and walk out into the hall and all the faces would turn, all those good acceptable faces and they would watch me talk to the door, open the door, close the door and stand in the hall. that hall was always very dark and empty. and it didn’t feel good. no, no. and it kept happening, through grade school, high school, those couple of years in college. of course, by college I had toughened up and when they layed on me I layed back and they soon found it was better to ignore me than have me slice them open with 5 or 6 words. but even in high school I was not ready. I remember once getting passing grades in this class, English, I think, and on the last day of class, in the middle of something else, the teacher, a female suddenly leaped up from her seat behind the desk and pointed at me and with tears on her face, actually sobbing and in some kind of rage, she said, “Henry, I am going to
FLUNK
you!” (Henry is my first name, I use Charles my middle name when I try to write but that is another long story I might explain sometime.) and after class, after the others had left and I asked her what the reason was for flunking me, she wouldn’t give a reason just that sobbing as if I had
INSULTED
her. I don’t think it was love because I was a rather ugly fuck with a blank personality, and I still don’t get it. I mean, these things keep happening and I am puzzled. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, only to say the letter to Dan never got mailed because there is a new newspaper starting here in town—
OPEN CITY PRESS
—and the editor wanted something of mine to print, essay, letter, so forth, and since I don’t keep carbons I just handed him 2 or 3 letters I had written.