Screams From the Balcony (44 page)

 

Louis Delpino was a fellow contributor to the little magazines
. The Sparrow and the Cock
was a long poem that he typed up and bound as a booklet dedicated to Bukowski as a thank-you for a recent phone call. The projected book of tributes to poets recently arrested was edited by T. L. Kryss (who had edited the tribute to Jim Lowell of Asphodel Bookshop) with Delpino and Douglas Blazek. It was published as
Forever Worship the Second Coming
(San Francisco: Black Rabbit Press, 1968)
.

 

[To Louis Delpino]

August 2, 1967

almost every day I get a piece of mail from somewhere from somebody saying, “hey, fucker, how come you ain’t answered my letter?”: it’s all right to be a good guy and to send 12 page drunken letters to 40 different people but after a while there just isn’t enough Bukowski to go around any more. then too, like other people I’ve got my troubles—job eating me up, car that won’t run, days of depression, sickness, so forth. have been real sick, job is hanging, I’m about finished there, and no trade, 47, no way to make it. not even writing poems anymore. meanwhile my little girl runs through here like all is sweet, climbing on the back of my neck and all that.

but not writing letters doesn’t cure much. I mean, I walk around like say, thinking of that very good poem you sent me—it’s in the bookcase now, somewhere, about madame somebody and that one fuck. one of the best poems I’ve read in 4 or 5 years, and I kept thinking I’ll write Lou about it when I feel better but I’ve never felt better. then your letter this morning about Richmond so now I must answer. I wrote Kyrass telling him I can’t do the Richmond. Cryass? Kryss? anyhow, I don’t know Richmond. I mean, I’ve been drunk with him, seen him 4 or 5 times but I don’t know him. there’s nothing you can write about him. he holes up pretty much by himself, won’t let people know where he lives. not that I give a damn, I’m a loner myself. but others complain that when they do find him, show at his door, he tells them, “go away, I’m busy.” and he is, and that’s his business. he usually has some bitch in there that has wandered into his bookstore, or whatever it has now turned out to be. he is covered with hair, fucks a lot, and I believe he is on the acid. also has dollars from family. told me once he is coming into a million or half million when he is 25. he was drunk, so I don’t know. anyway, the thing with Richmond is that very few people know him; I’m one that doesn’t. I wrote a foreword to a book of his poems, and that’s about it. Richmond is just a certain type. I don’t believe he wants anything written about himself, nor would he want me to write it. I did the foreword to his poems and that’s about as far as I want to go. book called
Hitler Painted Roses
.

frankly, I get a little tired of the Kryss books on these poet cats who get busted. I take it that this one is to be the 3rd. shit, a lot of people get busted who aren’t poets, or when they do they don’t think the bust is so special. plus too many of the bust-poets can’t write a cat turd. or when they do write, it’s all about busts, the nazi-state, so forth so forth. they become neurotic and closed-in. at least Behan, Genet, those, made a logical literary form out of their incarcerations. these other boys cry too much in mama’s hanky.

like I say, I haven’t been feeling good. maybe cranky, maybe cancer, maybe insanity. only God knows and He’s jacking off. but no Richmond. o.k.? fine. and thanks for the very good poem about Madame somebody.

[To Carl Weissner]

August 8, 1967

[* * *] christ, shit, broken stick—I will be 47 on the 16th and it won’t be long before they are dumping me, and it’s not death flapping down like that, it’s just that I haven’t been able to
BREATHE
properly. it has been like living inside a sardine can and then somebody comes along and hits me with a hammer. no fair. although, granted, I’ve helped them kill me, done almost everything possible to hurry along the process; and given a choice of walking through a gateway or ramming a wall, I have always seemed to ram the wall. but it’s not entirely stupidity. there’s a lot of sensible well-worked disgust resting within me too. why walk through the gateway when there’s a guy on the other side waiting with an ax? and these carbonated waterlumps who are my fellow man, how did they get here?

I haven’t written a poem in 4 or 5 months but I refuse to worry. it is not my idea to walk down the streets with poems glued to my forehead. the concern of the poem is to form itself—too many fellows pull them out with ganglia attached, no eyes, no feet; just dull puss and putty put-together. I have done it myself—worried about shadows and axes and the human face. something on paper—a bit of snot—it appears to help but it does not. now sometimes I just climb in bed and waste the few good hours—listen to sounds—the burbling turds of the city—the lost cunts—the flash false happiness flowers—what a machine we’ve built! this way I can work it out pretty good, in a kind of black cave of my mind, making little quiet measurements like a tailor. it is when I get drunk and then drunk and then drunk, and then the dank screeching hangover in steel collar and chains and dementia, worst kind of chicken-shit fears, real, but chicken-shit anyhow. my whole bedroom walls are glued with quiet experimental screams. I have them framed in blue and grey and green and red and yellow and whatever, and even when the dive bombers come and the city shakes and the electric light blinks on and off and the cat puffs up in anger under the palm tree, even then the screams hold their places, like places on a map yes, like tatoos. [* * *]

 

Delpino worked in the Philadelphia post office. He had recently had part of his drum set stolen
.

 

[To Louis Delpino]

August 12, 1967

jesus, I sure as hell don’t want to start any tedious correspondence but I am down to my last beer, and thot I’d drop this is the box on the way up to the liquor store. I’ve just beat out my weekly column for
Open City
. something about bullfights on t.v. and Ernie H. [* * *]

I pity your ass in the post office. I’ve been there 10 years. each night is more hell than the preceding one. they put in an air-conditioner that doesn’t work. we can’t breathe. people fall off their stools. the supervisors are hatchet-men, hand-picked. everything is graced with fear and stupidity. there and everywhere. try to get your drums back, for Christ’s sake!, they’ll murder you.

hot hot here. the beer the beer, that’s all there is. all of me is a big fat mound of beer. awakened several times in the night with nightmares. I don’t know where I am going.

Neeli Cherry by. I showed him
The Sparrow and the Cock
.

“god damn, this is good writing!”

“yes, it is.”

“who is he?”

“just somebody who lives in Philadelphia.”

well, man, I am down to the bottom of my beerbottle and there is no keeping me in here. sorry on the Richmond. just got a special delivery from Kryss who says he doesn’t believe I can’t do some writing on Richmond. well, it just isn’t there. you can’t set up a bank shot unless the run is proper.

be good to your wife. she probably thinks you are crazy.

Kryss writes that he is going to do a book of poems by
WILLIE
. that’s more like it.

like you, the mousy little mag scene is beginning to become less and less with me. I think because it is manned mostly by the very young, who then fade and some more very young replace them. which is all right in a way but in another way neither grows bones or heart. the poetry has this blithe lively sameness, the newness of sex, the terribleness of evil and so forth. all right for a while. then as it keeps being said you begin to yawn and yawn and yawn and
YAWN
. what’s new for the new is old for the old, and what is needed is darker earth and an almost plausible way. I am not speaking of religion; I am speaking of a movement forward from the same old crap. and I don’t think we are going to get it.
The Sparrow and the Cock
was pure literature. I am tired of propaganda. now I’ve got to get me some more beer. [* * *]

 

Michael Forrest was the first author other than Bukowski that Black Sparrow Press published
.

 

[To Michael Forrest]

Sunday August 20, 1967

forgive me for not answering sooner. I have been in a real fucked-up state. still am. health gone again. dizzy spells. fever. hours, nights, days, years of
DEPRESSION
. dark gauze stuff. no sense. just a haning [
sic
] hanging there. I make up words. why not? I am fucked. tried work tonight, the spells came over me, worked 3 hours, could go on longer no longer aye, grabbed side of case to keep from falling. and all around me, those
FACES
(faces?
feces!
) looking. no air. I left. they have been counseling me that I miss too many days. I get warnings, warnings. they think that I am faking it. the doctor thinks that I am faking it. “there’s nothing wrong with you, Bukowski! next patient, send in the next patient, please nurse.” I walk out and make it down the steps and the whole area of the boulevard is like a roller coaster. I can’t see. everything is sunlight. then shade, like dropping right into hell and being kissed by a smelly face like a toaster. like that. not exactly. something. I guess a man has to go to hell 90 times to see heaven once. for me, they can forget heaven. and hell too.

o, shit, it’s hot, the fever, the heat. I have this fan on. no good. I am afraid to drink. and the refrigerator is frozen solid into a block of ice. I have the door open and the ice won’t melt. I touch the ice and it isn’t even cold. it’s like marble, like porcelain. the radio will barely play. some kind of opera scratching. somebody is in agony. I smile just a little. The Comedy of Agony.

meanwhile, I have not written, have not answered letters, have not written poems. [* * *]

John [Martin] probably will do my book of new poems—if I am here—next Spring. I think Webb and I have fallen out. I wrote a column for
OPEN CITY PRESS
about my visit to Tucson and I think he saw it. I no longer hear. that’s o.k. I don’t think it was a dirty column. only factual. I have been doing a weekly column for
Open City
and if you want to see some, let me know and I’ll ship you a few. they let me write anything I wish. might stop doing the damn things soon. poems first, or living first, hell yes. [* * *] applied some months back for a grant from the Humanities Foundation. submitted what I have done of my novel,
The Way We Dead Love
. say they, I will hear in October. I asked for a year’s worth of money—$6,500 to live on while I go the damn thing. it’s true, I probably won’t get it, but what hell of a hell of a shot of life that would be; it would add 20 years to my life!

well, I am feeling a little better now. I guess it’s the sound of the typer. it’s the sound in my blood. what a way to get hooked! “Doctor, sir, I am sick. please let me type.” [* * *]

 

Blazek moved from Illinois to San Francisco in 1967 and en route stopped to meet Bukowski. The mutual readjustment of mental images produced by their exchange of letters was apparently disillusioning for both correspondents: afterwards, “there was no lasting warmth between the two men,” reports Neeli Cherkovski
(Hank).

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

September 5, 1967

ah shit, what a birthday caaard! I am taken. great, old man. thanks.

I suppose the days of long letters, the long-letter days are quits between us, but they did their work; both reading them and writing them was beef and roses and wine and clean socks, good things.

Landlord and landlady standing out there, gibbering gibbering gibbering, I can’t think. the fuckers stand around and shoot mouth night and day.

dogs barking through the gibbering. why don’t they go in the back? they live in the back. everybody gotta stand around Bukowski’s window, make his nuts jump and whirl in agony, ah. reminds me, book coming out, working now, Black Sparrow Press,
At Terror Street and Agony Way
. that’s where I live. a friend, a kind of friend I have in the hills says the title is corny. well, it’s corny if it’s not happening to you but if it’s happening to you, then it’s not corny. too many people are afraid to say the obvious, or they have to be just a bit cute and in the shadows, playing it out. see Creeley’s latest title:
Words
. now there’s a man who has never considered a butcher knife. well, for all that, editor asked me if I would do 50 original colored drawings for 50 editions plus 5 inch tape for some of the editions, and I said yes, and so my ass still up in work, not just the common drag work that kills, but working with the minutes I have left when I am not at the track when I am not drunk when I am not playing with Marina when I am not sick when I am not crazy, anyhow have done 12 drawings so far and that’s part of the way there. anyhow, he pays pretty fair royalties, and Evergreen took one of my poems, so maybe I will not be swept under the rug—$28 drunken phone bill, gas, lights, car breakdown, dentist bill, doctor bill for sickness of the 3 of us—hell, you know the act. it’s like a war. you sit in a room and outside there—there are all these factors working gearing sharpening to chop you down. all god’s children got troubles, what? I can’t even renew my driver’s license. can’t read god damned book, dull, may need glasses. mental block. all god’s children…my hemorrhoids are back. coming back. coming back. all that operation. finger up the bloody ass. hems coming back. must get off the beer for a couple of months, if I can. also same old dizzy spells, fits of depression, missed days at work, broke, clothes shot, same old shoes…. everything crazy and lumbersome and getting worse. shit, shit. then I go into work, make it, the
LONG LONG LONG HOURS
, people just sitting there
WORKING
, pissing their life-hours away and not feeling a thing, even feeling comfortable. oh, captain, let’s blow my fucking brains out and be done with it. [* * *]