Screams From the Balcony (6 page)

I got some more beer and we stopped off at J.’s, and here more trouble. I went into J.’s can and when I flushed the thing it ran over and out into the hall. He’s been having trouble with the thing and his landlady can’t seem to get it fixed and this set J. off. He has the true writer’s temperament and he ran down the stairs to fix his teeth in the landlady. I guess he was embarrassed about the toilet (I was too), and maybe the only way sensitive people can override embarrassment is to howl. I do not. When something bad happens I say nothing. What’s wrong with me there, I do not know. Anyhow, J. got his teeth in the landlady and a scene spouted up. She came up the stairs crying and had this mop and mopped the floor, and it was funny in a tragic way: here she was with the mop, weeping, poet J. standing over her saying, “Now, Mrs. M., I think you get simply too
emotional
over these things!” Anyhow, she went weeping down the steps, and J. came in and paced up and down cursing the toilet. He said he liked the view. You can see the whole horrible city of Los Angeles. J. likes to look at it. But he’s new in town. I’ve seen the welts of L.A. too long. I never go to the window. Not to look out at the city. To look at a bird maybe, all right. Anyhow, I guess you can’t blame him on the can: when a man wants to piss (or worse) you can’t piss in a view. Anyhow, we had another beer and left. I drove Stevens and his friend back to Pasadena, a city I am not too familiar with. My night was not over. When I left them out they said, “You see that blue light down there?” I told them I saw that blue light down there. They said, friend, when you get there, turn right. You’ll hit the freeway in about 2 or 3 miles. Well, I never did find the freeway. Maybe it was because I was too busy looking for a liquor store. It was about one thirty a.m. and they close at 2. But in Pasadena they close about 10 p.m. My old man said 30 years ago, “Pasadena is a one-horse town.” It was one of the few times he was on beam. And it still goes today.

To make it worse I got lost. I drove and drove and drove. And everything was closed. Gas stations, everything. Cafes, everything. On the largest boulevards there was not a single person on the streets. Just signal lights, street corners, and no direction signs and if there were direction signs they only said Arcadia and I had no idea where Arcadia was. I kept driving almost under a sense of panic. I get into these things time and time again. I got to thinking of Kafka, how he wrote about going into these buildings, one room after another, being shuffled and buffoned [
sic
] about, nothing making any sense. I am sure if Kafka had been driving with me this night he would have had another novel. Panic, sure, all you want is a bed and a cool beer and here you are driving in a peopleless world of smooth and efficient streets that only lead you further and further away and you can’t stop because this would then be real panic, you understand? I kept driving, and then it became really nightmare. I ended up in the hills! A small road going up into the hills and over one of the hills I saw a thing that looked like a Chinese temple. Jesus Christ, Jon, I was in Tibet! And sure enough, halfway through the hills here was this kind of Chinese village-inn type of thing, but no people, just these Chinese signs, and I began to feel as if I were going mad and I swung around the village driveway and shot back down out of the hills the way I came.

I must have driven an hour more, seeing no one, getting nowhere, backtracking, turning, going North, South, East, West. Then I saw a human being. He had one of these gas trucks and was running gas into a gas station. I asked him, “How do I get to L.A.?” “Whereabouts you want to get in L.A.?” he asked. “I don’t care
where
,” I told him, “just show me the city hall.” “Well, buddy,” he said, “you are going in the wrong direction. Just turn around and follow this street straight on in.” That simple.

But going back, I got found, I recognized some of the streets leading to Santa Anita racetrack and I was on my own route back home. I can get you to any racetrack from California to Mexico but don’t ask me where anything else is at.

I got to my sweet room, full of empty beer-cans and bottles and I went to the refrigerator. Luck. There sat one chilled and lovely glass bottle of Miller’s. I drank that and went to bed.

And that was the night of the photos. I hope something comes out of it because I don’t think I can go through with it again. Not this year, anyhow. I mean, other people can do these things easily. Me, I’m a frog on a dissection table. I guess that’s why I write. They keep cutting me open. It’s nothing profound, but so odd. And all these photos with this hunk of hair standing up on my head. I can’t even walk across a room with success. This morning I stepped on a can opener that was on the floor. No shoes on, of course. Another minor tragedy. Yet the spirit is not suicidal. I tend to linger just to see how many more odd turns the gods can throw on me. I suppose somebody will tell me I need the couch. Well, we all need the couch. Don’t tell me that with our Berlin walls and our stockpiles that our part of the universe is healthy and makes sense. If I need the couch they had better start building a lot of couches. I won’t deny that I might be somewhat off, don’t get me wrong But if you are going to try to show me a leader or a way out, I am going to ask a lot of questions.

Anyhow Stevens is supposed to phone me about the pictures. He has them in Pasadena and is going to put them into the soup. And I guess I am supposed to—ha, ah ha, ha, ha!!!—drive over and pick them up!

I will airmail them if I ever get to Pasadena and back again, and if you use any of them, I do wish you would give him a line: Photo or photos by John Stevens. Something like that.

Well, Jon, that’s how it went. I tried. Only wish my hair had been combed. Do you figure this ever happened to Hem or Willie the Faulk? I guess not. Going out to mail this now, get some beer and some sleep. To hell with the world’s series. I couldn’t sleep last night—steaming about the cockscomb.

[To Jon Webb]

Wednesday [?October 17, 1962]

[* * *] Tired today, from horses and other things, but hope to have a prof. photog up here tomorrow or Friday, and chances are he’ll have a better camera and know-how. That is, if I don’t go mad, or just don’t fall through the floorboards. This picture-taking has some semblance of horror in it to me. I go through the same thing whenever I get a haircut. And sometimes the bastards will spin you in the chair and show you yourself in the mirror. God. [* * *]

…I have all these letters Corrington has sent me, and I began to worry a while back when I was not feeling so good mentally and physically. I might have to get them off my hands and may ship them back through you and have Bill pick them up when he sees you. There is kind of an ivory-carved quality to most of these letters and they are much better than his poems. In the poem he still sometimes has this E.E. thing mixed with Auden plus a kind of hysterical abstract and fancy glibness. When the letters catch up to the poems (and I think they will)—I mean when the letters become the poems—they can’t catch them, being past them, Corrington will be a poet to listen to. He’s getting better now, which is much better than laying still. His politics and outlook a little too far right of center but this is the Southern Aristocrat somewhat, and doesn’t mean he lacks heart. Anyhow, if some day you get a pack of Corrington letters, I know you are busy, but flip through a few and hold the pack for Willie. They make the Miller letters look like burnt apple pie. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

[November 22, 1962]

[* * *] No, I am not feeling better. I need an operation for one of my maladies but don’t know if I have either the guts or the time for it. I never get splendid clean diseases that you can talk about over a cup of tea, like heart attack, stroke, amnesia, etc., but instead, ulcers and hemorrhages, madness, boils, ingrown toenails, rotten teeth, and now hemorrhoids, which, my dear, is a malady of the ass. [* * *]

It is more than difficult for me to survive. My present job has me by the throat and I don’t know how much more I can take. I have no special trade and am getting old. It will all end somewhere down the line: an old dirty demolished German pig, sitting on a doorstep looking in the sand for a razor.

Life is for achievement? Even Hegel’s achievements are paling. See how we waste? Life is avoidance of pain until death. Life is finding that love between 2 people only goes one way. One is always the master, the other the slave. Life is Tuesday afternoon in a cage. I do not like to talk about life. It gets silly. It sounds silly. Death is the master. [* * *]

[To Jon Webb]

November 25, 1962

[* * *] Very little new out here. Just difficult to believe you are working on this Outsider of Year thing about me. I keep thinking of a certain paper shack I ended up once in in Atlanta without light, heat, food, typewriter or drink. A most cold, most dark end. Yow. I have slept on park benches in the warm parts of the country and there seemed air and light and easiness, but somehow this was so closed and finished. My ass was really in the trap, the first gilded shape of hell reaching out. I did have a pencil and I sat there in the dark daytime ice writing things on the edges, the margins of old newspapers that I found on the floor. How I got out of there I don’t remember, but I did and I left the writing there. It was quite mad, most of it, I guess. Now I have 3 collections of poetry, have been photographed by imbeciles, and you are giving me the honor and light of the O. of Y. award, almost as if much of my misery had been recorded right along as it happened. So many of our writers now have teaching positions, they teach the thing they do, and it’s no wonder the writing has no lumps, no rawness. But in spite of this, I am sure that right now there is some poor bastard freezing-starving somewhere, writing sonnets on toilet paper. Not all of us can go through the college degree teaching bit. We cannot jump through the hoops; no wiseness in practical sense of survival. If an English teacher can write, good enough for me. You don’t have to be thrown into half a hundred drunk tanks to be shaken into or out of life. But there is something about their lives that is too safe, too pat. Their intrigues of the day are political, bitchy and petty, feminine. Very few of them come to class drunk. They know what they are doing, even when they sit down to a typewriter. Corrington seems to have escaped much of this but I keep thinking they will get him. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

Late November, 1962

[* * *] Kafka, unlike your Henry James, was not ordinarily intelligent and discerning. Kafka was a god damned petty clerk who lived a good damned [
sic
] petty life and wrote about it, the dream of it, the madness of it. There is one novel where a man enters this house, this establishment, and it appears that from the viewpoint of others that he is guilty of something but he does not know what. He is shuffled from room to room, endlessly, to the rattle of papers and bureaucracy, a silent simmering horrible living dream of ordinary mad and pressing, senseless everyday life. Most of his books are on this order: the shadow, the dream, the stupidity. Then there are other things—where a man turns into a bridge and lets people walk across him. Then there is another where a man gradually turns into a giant cockroach (“The Metamorphosis”) and his sister feeds him as he hides under the bed. Others, others. Kafka is everything.

Forget Henry James. James is a light mist of silk. Kafka is what we all know. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 30, 1962

[* * *] Yes, disgusting the rent they charge of a dive in the business districts of anywhere, and the landlord doesn’t have to do anything but sit back and take it in while you hope to make it—somehow. Hang on, you’re getting an
award
too, somewhere, somehow; this is lit. history like
Poetry
when Ez was European editor and full of beans, or even like Mencken’s
Mercury
; or
Dial
; but you are essentially the new center and the part of this age, only people never realize the blood sweat weariness disgust breakdown & trial of soul that goes into it; and the puking little criticisms of milk-white jackasses. [* * *]

 

Federman was coeditor of
Mica,
the last issue of which appeared in November 1962. Bukowski’s story, “Murder,” was published not in
Mica
but in
Notes from Underground,
no. 1 (1964). Dorbin records no earlier story in
Mica,
although one was published in Canto (Los Angeles), winter 1961
.

 

[To Raymond Federman]

December 6, 1962

Rec. your O.K. on “The Murder.” I write very few short stories—you’ve taken the only 2 I have written in years. Both of them were very close to a type of personal experience and feeling that just did not seem to fit into the shorter poem-form.

You might call “The Murder” a prose-poem as I have worked with the poem so long that when I do try the story-form I still feel as if I were laying down the poem-line.

It might interest you to know that over drinks and in conversational lulls with the few odd people that get in here I have told the story of “The Murder,” first telling them what made me write it, what was happening to me at the time, and how I took this and made it into a story—or whatever it is.

Their comment at the finish was usually, “Jesus Christ!,” which I took more as a criticism than a vindication.

[To Ann Bauman]

[Tuesday] December 18, 1962