Screams From the Balcony (10 page)

I deserve to die. I wait upon death like a plumed falcon with beak and song and talon for my caged blood. This may sound pretty god damned pretty but it is not. The poetry part of me, the seeming actuality, what I write, is dung and dross and saliva and old battleships sinking. I know that when the world—which is fairly cheap and stylish and what? what?—forgets a little of the poetry that I have written, it will not be entirely the fault of the world—mainly because I do not
think
of writing, and only the edge of the knife…where I spread the butter or cut the onion keeps practice in the verse of my mind.

You do not know how much your call meant although I was seemingly dull and drab and stupid, but I do wish you would not do it again because I know how things are going for you and yours (not so good) and I don’t want the few good people of the world hurt because of buk the puke. (Someone once wrote me that Buk rhymed with puke and she was correct, not only in manner, which is bad, but also in the way the chandeliers work their still lightning in an empty room) and I say, everything is pretty good now but I of course don’t know when or if or what the next o my god stroke of everything will bring, which is a coward’s viewpoint, and all drowning men are cowards, hear them scream, and life is what? what? going down into the water, and it is not the cutting off of air and light and lung and eye and love that counts—it’s the itch they put into us making us wonder why the hell we are here. For these few things. Like a phone call from Sacramento at 7:30 p.m. I don’t know, I don’t know, and it is so sad. If I could give tears to make it right we would all drown in my sick tears. I hardly know what to do. I drink too much. Or not enough. I gamble. I make love to women who only exist within their bodies and I look against the flakes of their eyes and I know that I am lying to myself and to them because I am no less than a dog, and love or the act should contain more than a couple of steaks in a frying pan or else all is lost like weeds in a garden or snails stepped upon and crushed and left in some sort of slime which contains life, smashed life forever and foreboding.

This poetry-thing is the worst sort of crutch. It weakens a man. And if a man is weak before he writes poetry he becomes, finally, through the strumming of shadows and wailing, he becomes finally what he is—just another fine pink juicy boy doing his god damned job in the frailest and most vomiting way.

You’ve got to understand that there are other ways of facing the horn except through the typewriter. Those who are known to us may just be a bad choice of chance. Never take the Arts as a holy mirror. Very little is just, and that includes all the centuries. The most honorable countries do not survive through courage nor do the ages survive us the best artists. Everything is chance and shit and the strumming of the winds. Please forgive the center word. If I hate anything it is a vile word said vilely or a dirty joke or the making of sex and life and woman and man into the thing they seem to want it to be.

I am probably fairly insane and you should know this (a more somber note with golden screeching undertones) and I do not mean to knock your verse plays…some have been done well…Racine, etc., only it is too much and ever so easy to mock and cajole when you do not
give
or try, and I say go ahead: verse, or phone calls or cards or death or love or vast areas of bathing in arenas of sound and stroke and midnight moments, I thank you for going on and I, too, go on a little while more.

p.s.—don’t hate me for feeling more than is (perhaps) necessary. It may be best that the lost frogs and space-burnt nylon and neon air…it may be best that we are creatures of gesture instead of reality and marriage is reality with life and very few of us can stand either marriage or reality or life. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 7, 1963

[* * *] Gypsy, when I phoned last I remember saying “Goodbye, Baby,” and it bothered me for hours afterwards. It is simply terminology, crass yes, hell yes, but you should know all the people I know who toss this term, and it can mean everything—to you it meant simply the best of everything: luck, love of the kind I know, rising spirits, grace, 7, the nose in front, holy Mary, you name it. That’s what it meant. and you know it. and you stay out of this, Jon.

[To John William Corrington]

[?Mid-]May, 1963

[***]…on the blood yes, it is not too good, and I know the cancer-bit. I remember my mother. She couldn’t straighten her legs. womb. gut. she kept telling me all along, “Your father is a great man.” I knew what my father was. She didn’t. I took her a rosary on Christmas eve or Christmas day, I can’t remember. She was dead. Fry was with me. Fry was dead too.

I pretend that the blood from my mouth is bad teeth and the blood from my ass is from hemorrhoids and then I feel better and take another drink. What man wants to waste his time in hospitals? I am not so particularly concerned with writing poetry as I am concerned with standing around in the sun or just sleeping or getting drunk or looking at the poor face of some old woman I have made love to and watching her eyes eating into my face, into my body, this delight delight, until I am ashamed and turn my eyes down. I am tired as hell but the longer I live the more something begins to take shape. I thought the whiskey would finally ride my brain down, and maybe it has, and as I type this to you I am listening to some new Broadway musical, they are pretty similar, it is more Artless in its shouting than a blowjob whore, but it is a moment, a sound, not bad, and I am writing this to you and I am drunk but I am still alive, and we write on, over and over, live on, your wife, your kids, myself, Jon, Lou,
WILDCAT
, and tomorrow’s entries. The fucking stage, yeah, the fucking stage, we are all there. [* * *]

 

Jory Sherman’s
My Face in Wax
with an introduction by Bukowski was published by Windfall Press, Chicago, in 1965
.

The end of this letter refers to Karl Shapiro’s introduction to the first book of Jack Hirschman
(A Correspondence of Americans [
Indiana Univ. Press, I960]), who in the 1960s was teaching at UCLA. “Was invited to dinner by Jack and his wife Ruth,” Bukowski notes. “I drank a lot of wine and made an ass out of myself. Jack has the ability to get off some strong lines and poems, strange and original
.”

 

[To John William Corrington]

May 23, 1963

got yr 2 letters right one on the other, and I am hanging in (yet); sometimes I think u think I think I am sliding under the table. Drunk phone calls are my specialty. Cost me 50 bucks a month, which if the mules don’t start dancing, I’m gona haveta stop doing, but don’t worry, there’s bloody ass but windows with screens, and how are
YOU
doing? They went bad again today, and my feet hurt, and no money ha, but that’s not it, it’s the
TIME
melting like vanilla, boy, and I am going ha, and that’s it, a crotch, a crotch of grey waiting to stretch out and stop farting, and fucking old things, but the drinking’s not bad, the drinking lifts, verily, John, fills the gap I’m not filling at the time, it’s beans on the shelf, things going, radios, and all the words of silence that crawl the walls like cockroaches. Bang, bang, you’re dead. [* * *]

I’m not worried about the Southern problem; that will work itself loose into another problem. And the bomb. That will, slovenly thing, solve itself. You know the ol’ hack—we cure the obvious and the subtle takes over, and if it’s subtle enough some grow fat and happy and others grow mad. I know this woman (pretty well), she marches on City Hall, the protest thing, either the black or the bomb, and she asks me, why don’t you do something? and I don’t say it, but I think
I AM DOING SOMETHING
, I am fucking you and you seem to like it a lot more than I do.

But I tell her, down where I work at night, I know plenty for there are 4 thousand people in this building and three thousand five hundred of them are black or mostly black, and I get along solidly with those I like, but here the problem is in being
WHITE
, and I have faced the problem in the factories and the slaughterhouses, I have been the
WRONG
color most of the time, but I can’t expect sensibility when they nailed christ on the cross for pulling miracles, I don’t go around pulling rabbits out of the hat. I have gotten close to their women and I have seen a black walk up to these women with a piece of white chalk in his hand and draw a line of white on his skin and ask one of these women, now will you have
ME
?

The fact that he was a sloppy strutting egocentric bastard, he did not take into consideration, only the fact that he was black. It’s hard being black. It’s even hard being white. It’s hard being alive.

She listens to this and says, At the meeting today I saw the most
beautiful
thing. This girl, she took this man’s shoes and stockings off and washed his feet in a pan of water, and then, after carefully and tenderly washing his feet, she kissed his feet, she was so young and beautiful and had this long hair and it fell over her face, and she kissed his feet, kissed his feet, and then she put his stockings on and then she put his shoes on.

Now this woman did not tell me the color of skins involved here, but I knew, of course. And I said, Well, I guess when we find out God is black we’ll all feel better and get around to raising roses. don’t get me wrong willie, but don’t get me right, either, it’s so easy to be
RIGHT AND DO THE PROPER THING
when you figure you’ve got the proper
cause
, and nothing to worry about, and that’s what puts old men and women in churches on Sundays in their proper clothes—there’s no drawback, and it seems like courage, it seems like knowing. This is a pretty good feeling. Some people go around looking for easy good feelings. Like a young girl kissing a black’s feet in front of a Los Angeles crowd and feeling good because everybody knows you’re going to fuck him later when nobody’s around. Because your parents didn’t understand Proust or Conrad Aiken. A psychologist could tell you a lot more about this than I can. But the human mob never solves a problem straight on; it generally fucks up in a mesh of shit and carries further problems to the problem, and the weak ones protest the most and do the most because there is this hungry space within them that can only see the immediate, the thing that can answer back and boy, they feel good; it’s either a war or a pol. party or a magnet of some sort, and when they are long dead to the worms, somebody a couple of centuries later, when it gets cooler and clearer, decides that they have done the
WRONG
thing. I hate to leap into dishwater. Like you know guys used to go to doctors and the docs would put these suction cups on them and draw out their blood and they would pay for this. Then there’s the history of wars. I am bullshitting a loghead tonight but the mules were bad and this too is a sort of colossal type of righteousness blah to right the torn-up tickets. But I know my madness more properly than many others. I hope, ya. I have an idea the medics are some day going to find out that cutting out cancer with a knife was the quickest way to death. Or that teeth never should have been pulled. These are guesses but I am a pretty good guesser and I know that rot should be removed but not with such force and gesture, and further bullshit. [* * *]

On the foreword to Sherman’s book you will see that I am talking mostly about myself, which is savage and lets out air and sometimes a little light. Don’t worry about me laying out any bolognas out on the stage. I mostly blast Shapiro in it, in opening, not mentioning name, about using his name to promote another college Eng. teacher, and giving the grand come-on, I found the pages not to be like that at all. This is just part of it. I went over drunk one time and ate with man and wife in their house, the book I speak of with Shapiro foreword, and I told them I didn’t like it, that it shouldn’t have been done, it was bad for Shapiro and it was bad for them. Now I do not argue and I do not take stands but sometimes an idea will come out of me drunk during a drink and I will say it.

You know what he said?

Well, the book never would have gotten printed without it.

That’s what he said. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

June 3, 1963

Well, I got the plaque, it was leaning against the door when I opened it—the bastard didn’t knock, or I was asleep. Anyway, it’s on the wall now, it’s a fine thing and it holds the walls up…“the poet Charles Bukowski.” Sometimes it’s all in the dream-state and I don’t know who Bukowski is. Sometimes I expect somebody to walk out of my bathroom and say, “Give me a smoke, man, I am Charles Bukowski.” Anyhow, something like this which you needn’t have done at all and did do with this beautiful gesture of warmth…this thing on the wall will be mine, and as the years go on—saving I hang around—this plaque will mean more and more to me. [* * *]

Our boy Sherman has a book coming out in which I write a long introduction. It was done sometime back when I was feeling pretty good. I speak more of myself…if I remember…than I do of Sherman. Neeli Cherry was orig. going to bring book out and Sherman asked me if I would do intro. I said I didn’t know and then one day sat down and found myself writing it. I hope they have not cut it because then it would not make sense. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

June 3, 1963

[* * *] If you should ever come down here your problem will be to keep the conversation “dull.” I am an old wolf and after a few beers begin to imagine myself a young bull. I would always rather chance that they go away angry and unloved than unangry and unloved. It is better, of course, for them to leave unangry and loved, but of the other choices, at least I will know that I have tried. [* * *]