More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (2 page)
Read More Notes of a Dirty Old Man Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne
Buk: “Fair enough. Let’s leap into something else: the inflation spiral on paper, ink, type, everything from hamburgers to paperclips has, in a sense, become ridiculous. Don’t you feel that after finishing one project that the next one has become almost priced out of reach?”
Jon: “I was pretty ignorant at this business when I started but I learned to become an honest con-man, meaning I’ve given in to developing cordial relationships with businessmen—the ones who sell me these things at such high prices. I simply con them into thinking my small order is only a sampler, the first part of a huge order, and in so doing lay the groundwork for a deal, which in business parlance means getting a cut in price. In other words, I talk in carloads until they quote me carload prices. It’s a dirty approach, but the fact I have to wear a starched collar and conservative necktie to put the approach over sort of cancels in my mind the dirtiness out of it.”
Buk: “I agree. Now, all of your work is done by the two of you. Breaking down your total profit and dividing the hours worked, what do you judge your hourly wage, per person, to be?”
Jon: “If it turns out there is a profit—we call anything above cost profit—our net income for hours worked so far has never exceeded 8 cents an hour.”
Buk: “Is it worth it? Wouldn’t you rather be picking beets or selling Fuller brushes door to door? And how about those editing and design offers from New York publishers? Don’t you ever get tired of the hard road?”
Jon: “No, we work out of a compulsion, same as I always did when writing. It’s a love that’s transferred, that’s all. Just like when a loved one dies, the idea of writing died too. I simply transferred the love for writing to the love for publishing. I could go on but I would only get increasingly flip. Because the reason any of us are in a work that is economic suicide can’t logically be articulated upon without getting into a bragging—like calling oneself an artist. I think we’re artists, but it could be everything we’re doing that’s good is just accidental. We’ve still a long way to go.”
Buk: “All right, fair enough. But now let’s talk about ‘angels’. Where are the angels? I know that they DO exist. For instance, there is a poet in Europe, an American exile, not overly exceptional who is supported by some rich folk who rarely ask questions or slug him with demands and he is simply not that good. Frankly, I think you deserve an angel or 2 or 3. Do you think that yours will ever appear?
Jon: “Everybody who buys our books are angels. But getting back into the meat of it, you have to go after angels and we haven’t had the time. We will eventually put on a big promotion for an angel. A good angel. We’ve had lots of offers from bad angels, the ones with strings attached. Like the rich widow in Louisiana who owns 4,000 acres of bottom land that’s zooming in value because the Northern manufacturers are coming in. She offered us 40 acres plus a plantation house if we published her True Story Magazine style book under our Loujon Press imprint. Book was about her discovery after her husband’s death that he once had a mistress. This book she wrote was an unending lambasting of him, hoping to turn him over in his grave. Broke our hearts, but we had to turn her down.”
Buk: “Is the Miller book moving?”
Jon: “How could a Miller book not move?”
Buk: “I mean fast. How can we let people know that if they see these books with their eyes they will buy them? How can we let people know that these books you do will be collector’s items selling for 5 or 10 times their publication price in 4 or 5 years, or less?”
Jon: “We’re not much interested in selling to those people, the ones we have to let know these books we do are eventual collectors’ pieces. But a lot of those people buy our books, and without knowing it are angels of a sort. So we love them, they help us keep going.”
Buk: “Very true. But these formats you use that scream collectors’ item at one look, what’s behind them?
Jon: “Behind them is the fact that all rules of book publishing have come to a deadend, especially in design. All we’re doing with our mixed-up formats is fumbling for a way out of that deadend, or past it. If we don’t get past it we’ll get out of this work, same as I got out of writing—and into something else. Like maybe underground filmmaking.
“But getting back to design, I believe with McLuhan that the medium is the message. And it has been our good luck, so far, to publish writers who will let us dress them up in our particular types of format, our packaging. So far, in the books we’ve done it hasn’t hurt either of us.”
Buk: “Have basic type styles changed? How do you select your types?”
Jon: “By eye. The more you pore over books of typefaces, type samples, so forth, the more type you might tend to like, and after weeks of studying you end up picking a certain typeface, cable some far-away country and you get a reply that that particular typeface has not been cast for 20 or 30 years, so you begin all over again. This happens mostly because, in our opinion, type design has also come to a deadend. So you start going back into time to find something good. You can’t do that with book design, because you can’t create new book design by copying the old masters at it. But type is okay to copy. It’s merely one of the tools you work with to create.”
Buk: “How do you decide on publishing a book?”
Jon: “It’s rough, but mostly it’s a case of love, of the work to be published, and the writer too. Because around that work, also the writer, you have to work months creating a format which fits that writer. Not one that fits us, that’s silly. The whole format has to be an extension of both the writer’s personality and the work of his we’re publishing. And you’d get nowhere there without a love involved for the writer embodied in his talent. People say we must love our work. We don’t. Work always is pretty drab, if it isn’t just plain hell. But we love what comes out of the work. And when it’s done, there’s another hell in which we have to transfer the love for a book just done to the next one in line. To the next writer in line. Queer, eh?”
Buk: “Hell, no. But go on, what is the ultimate you would like to do in book design?”
Jon: “Well, if I’m constantly mulling over an elusive idea, Gypsy is too. It’s to put out a book of great beauty and original design with which the buyer immediately falls in love and which is certain to become a top value collector’s item, but which on opening and reading to the last page suddenly falls apart in the reader’s hands, virtually disintegrates, and can in no way be put back together again.”
Buk: “I get you. The buyer will buy another book at once to see if the same thing happens with the second copy.”
Jon: “That isn’t the reason for it, no. But you’ve given me an idea—thanks.”
Buk: “Whatever the reason, seems like a dirty trick on the writer. All his work and yours too shot to hell forever.”
Jon: “Oh, I’d first find a writer who didn’t mind, be sure of that. Like you maybe.”
Buk: “Come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t mind. Might be fun writing for a posterity that disintegrated in the reader’s hands instead of his brain. But space is running out. Any final good word to the reader of this column or any readers anywhere?”
Jon: “Well, even the broadside announcement on the Miller book, printed on Parchment paper, 19 by 25 inches, is now a collector’s item. But we’ll mail one to anybody who sends us a postcard, and we’ll go the postage. Our address is 1009 East Elm, Tucson, Arizona 85719. LOUJON PRESS.”
Buk: “How come it’s so damned hot down here in June and July?”
Jon: “I don’t know, but it’s the next best thing to hell. That’s probably why we’re here.”
Buk: “I think this interview is over.”
Jon: “Me, too.”
Buk: “You got anymore beer?”
Jon: “We knew you were coming by.”
Bukowski goes out into the kitchen of the Desert Workshop Printery and gets one. The interview is over. The great poet Bukowski and the great editor Webb sit across from each other, looking in and out and over with glazed and perhaps? immortal spirits. Life goes on anyhow.
I was going over my old
Racing Forms
, having a beer and a smoke, really hungover, shaky, depressed; gently thinking suicide but still hoping for a lucky angel when there was a knock on the door, a very light knock, I barely heard it. I listened and there it was again. I hid my bag of Chesterfields under the fireplace and opened the door just a slit. “Bukowski?” said the voice. “Charles Bukowski?” and there was this woman standing out in a light rain, in the 9 p.m. rain between 2 dying plants on the front porch of the front court in which I lived, badly, among beer, and mouse-shadows, and old copies of Upton Sinclair and Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis, and I looked out looked out looked out and IT WAS A WOMAN and WHAT a woman in that 9 p.m. rain—long red hair all down the back, jesus: tons of red miracle. And the face, open with passion, like a flower ripped open with the fingers from the bud, a kind of fire-cheating, and the body, the body was nothing but SEX, sex standing still jumping singing looking flowing humming in the 9 p.m. rain saying, “Bukowski, Charles Bukowski?” and I said, “Come on in,” and she did, she came in and sat on the chair in front of the fireplace and the walls of the room began to weave in and out like on a trip, and the rug said, what the hell oh my god oooh oooooooooooh, and she CROSSED HER LEGS and the skirt was high and I looked up the thighs, boldly, jesus, I was out of my skull, thighs knees high heels long tight stockings flow and flesh oh lord and she kicked her foot, turned on ankle, ow ow ow, mercy! And the red hair the red hair flocked all along the back of the chair, the red hair on fire in the lamplight, I could barely hold on I could barely understand, I did not deserve to even LOOK, and I knew it.
Racing Forms
, having a beer and a smoke, really hungover, shaky, depressed; gently thinking suicide but still hoping for a lucky angel when there was a knock on the door, a very light knock, I barely heard it. I listened and there it was again. I hid my bag of Chesterfields under the fireplace and opened the door just a slit. “Bukowski?” said the voice. “Charles Bukowski?” and there was this woman standing out in a light rain, in the 9 p.m. rain between 2 dying plants on the front porch of the front court in which I lived, badly, among beer, and mouse-shadows, and old copies of Upton Sinclair and Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis, and I looked out looked out looked out and IT WAS A WOMAN and WHAT a woman in that 9 p.m. rain—long red hair all down the back, jesus: tons of red miracle. And the face, open with passion, like a flower ripped open with the fingers from the bud, a kind of fire-cheating, and the body, the body was nothing but SEX, sex standing still jumping singing looking flowing humming in the 9 p.m. rain saying, “Bukowski, Charles Bukowski?” and I said, “Come on in,” and she did, she came in and sat on the chair in front of the fireplace and the walls of the room began to weave in and out like on a trip, and the rug said, what the hell oh my god oooh oooooooooooh, and she CROSSED HER LEGS and the skirt was high and I looked up the thighs, boldly, jesus, I was out of my skull, thighs knees high heels long tight stockings flow and flesh oh lord and she kicked her foot, turned on ankle, ow ow ow, mercy! And the red hair the red hair flocked all along the back of the chair, the red hair on fire in the lamplight, I could barely hold on I could barely understand, I did not deserve to even LOOK, and I knew it.
“Care for a beer?” I asked.
“All right,” she said.
I got up and I could hardly walk. I had enough hose to put out a forest fire of napalm.
I came back with the beer, didn’t give her a glass, watched her drink it from the bottle, that stuff going into her, into her red hair into her body into her everywhere and I peered up her legs not getting enough and I drank out of the bottle.
She put down her bottle. “You are a great writer,” she said.
“That’s no reason for coming to see me.”
“Yes it is, yes it is. You see you fascinate me, you write this way and you look like, you look like—”
“The trashman?”
“Yes, or a diseased gorilla, an undergrown aged gorilla dying of cancer. And those goddamn eyes, slits of eyes but when you finally OPEN them for just that second—shit, I never saw eyes LIKE THAT, that COLOR, that VICIOUS FIRE—”
“And you came here to see what I was, see what I am, oh?”
“I guess so. I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t. I only know that I’m here. I can’t help it. You’re a gorilla. You’re some kind of snake. You’re anything filthy. You stink. I don’t know you. I know that you’re not the guy at Bryan’s staff meetings, threatening cripples, staggering about the room, cursing everybody and looking for more to drink more to drink more to drink. Such a swine you are!”
“A woman always wants to find the core, tame it, mold it; a wise man never shows the core to a woman. He just gives her a shot of light, shuts it off, becomes himself again. A woman practices rearing the child by taming the man first. I’ve got no use for women except to fuck them. I won’t be trapped in. Love is a form of selfishness. Love is an excuse for cowards to quit.”
“Nicely spoken. Sounds all right, bastard, but what does it mean?”
She lifted her beerbottle again, recrossed her legs, the skirt going HIGHER, jesus have mercy, the skirt going HIGHER, all that leg, all that thigh, all that red HAIR, god.
I got up and pulled the beerbottle from her mouth and put my dirty bearded face to hers, my lips sucking and twisting at hers, hard full crazy, she did not push me away, I grabbed her under the back, I had her back arched, I had her head rolling on the back of the chair, our lips splashed together spliced together crazy, my hand under the back of that BIG body, god, the beerbottle knocked over and spewing on the floor, and I reached down with the other hand and ripped her skirt all the way UP, lord lord lord then I had her standing, I was walking, pushing her all over the room, feeling that red hair around my ears across my face, feeling miracle and madness, and then I worked the pants down and then I HAD HER, I HAD HER, I HAD HER, and I worked, I grabbed that long red hair and I yanked down on it. I had her back arched arched hurting her and I HAD HER I worked and holding the hair still in my hands in back I got the cheeks and spread them, I had her nailed in the center of the rug, I had her on the cross, it was too late for her, she was on the spike, ripped ripped and the yellow light from the lamps bathed us and all that could be heard was our breathing and our grappling. Who would have guessed? Who? And then BANG the walls shook, a man on the street stepped on a grease spot, fell and broke his ankle and we slid apart like worms going in different directions, and she stood there and said, “ooooh ooooh ooooh I liked it, I liked it I liked it, you filthy greasy pig,” and then she turned and walked into the bathroom and closed the door. I went into the kitchen, took a dishtowel, wiped off. Got out 2 more beers. Lit a smoke.
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