Screams From the Balcony (17 page)

—the old woman says to give her love to your 3 year old. I give my love to your lucky dog who can’t speak English. give your wife a kiss from me too. arrg, we are getting sloppy. some good classical stuff on now. I go the classical & the new experimental & the 12 tone, which of course, is now old. we all get old so fast. I like jazz too when I like it.—I’ve got to get ready to go in to the pit. my back aches already. I can see now the sheer empty bash of faces, the screaming guggling words; the dumpling of a foreman in his white shirt and eyes of spit…the blood is everywhere.

hold to something.

[To Douglas Blazek]

December 8, 1964

Harlequin
was a grunion, a brick goblet, a drowning moll, and there was something about a dwarf, a dwarf at the door and I had 75 cents in my pocket and it was early morning in Texas and she stayed in bed and the d. took me out and showed me showed me the old man’s lands and lakes and belongings and I was not impressed and I did not say anything only rather yawned but the dwarf thot I was a sharpy he thot I married her for money which wasn’t exactly so and I do not want to tell you exactly what it was because it was more personal on her part than mine and more sacrificial on my part than hers & dollars be damned, and it didn’t last, of course, she had the millions coming and wrote bad poetry and I had 75 cents and wrote poetry, and there I was and she had the magazine and then she wasn’t too interested and left submissions in the closet or under the sofa or mixed in with the kotex and I took to answering these things and became more or less a part of the magazine until she met a Persian with a stickpin and a lisp and that led to divorce and then I heard she was in Alaska and she married a Japanese fisherman or school teacher named Kami and Kami had wonderful manners, a gentleman, and
Harlequin
more or less c e a s e d, I could give my god I cd give you more but it’s so dry; I think shots of light are best, nice stores tories stories have slivers and yawns.

[* * *] I really don’t know if there is enough plentitude of talent to deserve even one magazine. and when I say talent I mean
JUICE TO MAKE THE EARS JUMP
and the hands look like hands, know they are hands and the window screens to look like mother’s panties, I mean
SOMETHING
. I just don’t think it’s there—maybe a line or 2, and then limp again, making the same old picture. maybe it’s the human race, maybe we’re just full of shit and no light, maybe we’re still full of shit after we shit it out.

There are many things that bother me. I know that I have never passed a man on the street that I liked—most of them giving off a kind of ether of disgust and stumbling and clay-eating, snot-eating grievance. I don’t like the human race at all. this is my confessional, father, pass the wine. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

December 9, 1964

no murals, noting nothing, the overtime has got me, I am dead, dog-fucked tired and the old woman drops tin cans in the bathtub and walks around complaining that life is hard, the baby is cranky she says and she has a cold and maybe the baby has a cold too. my old woman has had a cold ever since I messed-up with her. well, look. yeah, a cold head too. what I mean. I got
Ole
and the few moments I have left before going into the mill again, maybe I could say something, although I feel my sight is a little twisted today. what’s wrong with the foreword, introduction? I agree, we gotta put balls on poetry. this lisping home freak has layed pale in dead libraries long enough, let’s bomb on out. [* * *]

let me say off and on and over as time keeps running that it was a lively number a good number and I can say this easy without lying which I have not learned to do yet and so you wanted to know and so now I’ve told you, & we look
FORWARD
to more
Ole
, poetry with balls!!

and I will put this in an envelope and tool through traffic, weaving around the old ladies and grinding toward the death, my foot to the floor, all insurance companies have already dropped me and the police leap out from behind the palm trees of night on their scooters to hunt down the nub of snarling over the wheel, go go go!, down Sunset, to Alpine street, then a left and out of car and leap into fire of death and fire of dead faces and why I still will be able to walk around and move my fingers I’ll never know. [* * *]

[To Jim Roman]

January 11, 1965

Who the hell is U. Grant Roman via “ML” and signed Jim Roman?

You Rebs oughta forget
that
war awhile. There’ve been other wars, and I was born in Andernach, Germany, August 16th, 1920. Yet when I bummed through the South, and particularly in Houston, they kept calling me a “Yankee” in the bars and threatened to beat the shit out of me. I always got so drunk, tho, they never got around to it because it wouldn’t have been much of a victory. [* * *]

I was re-reading your “Outsider” catalogue the other night, and some odd & pliable & weird & strange assortments in there. I keep thinking of the one woman in there (forget name) who said she’d burn all her works and damn near did. I might say it’s refreshing compared to the almost standard preciousness of some of our better talents. If I’d saved all my notebooks I wouldn’t be able to move around in this kitchen—or read them either. Yet you can’t tell the possible value of some of that stuff, say even later. (their stuff, I mean.)

Imagine having something, say, some scrawls by Whitman or T. S. Eliot or old Ez? Even these jaded fingers might tremble?

Keep the despair bottled. We’ll all out under a handful of cropped and drying blooms—

PHILIP HENRY SHERIDAN BUKOWSKI

 

The essay Blazek accepted was “A Rambling Essay on Poetics and the Bleeding Life Written While Drinking a Six-Pack (Tall)”; it was printed in
Ole
no. 2, March 1965
.

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[January 13, 1965]

this is still Los Angeles, yes, and it’s Jan. 13th. and the rent is due again, and I shove the green into his hands and he drives off in his three cars. Listening to Meyerbeer, an opera, somebody has gone mad and now runs off and sings with her other-self. the bile backs up into a shoal which gets so large ya can never swallow it. I have spoken. Silence in the back rows!

Glad the essay got past you, although I am always ready for the reject, I am a dark alley loser from way back, and I write badly enough when I try and when I don’t try, and so all right. Although I drank more than a six pack getting it done. It was 6 writing it in long hand and then 6 or 8 typing it, dropping and adding, translating…all right.

No, Purdy didn’t tell me he’d send anything. g.d. shame. but we’ve got to let him live. He’s going to the North Pole or something on some crazy kind of grant. He scrapes through the hard way (or the easy way) doing things like this. Maybe he’s wiser than we are, we who are walking into those buildings where they scrape the meat and replace the eyes with apple pits and bird droppings.

No, I’m not any good at babies’ names, and it’s a torturous thing I don’t enjoy at all, and always figure it’s best to forget the thing and leave it up to the woman since it seems to mean more to them. Except if they come up with something outlandish I can’t craw down.

I have nothing, right now, for mimeo press book series although I may try and give you a submission later and glad for invite. Going to New Orleans in March to help Webb wind up
Crucifix
but all I’ll prob. do is end up getting him drunk, which isn’t very nice, but it’s kind of relaxing while it’s going on and you’re not paying the price until later, ah. If I should submit something it would not be poetry, I think, but rather a wild literary blast rolling zombie easy and graceless headless type of thing, easy on me and perhaps confusing to the reader. I have a title in mind I have been trying to get rid of,
Confessions of a Coward and Man Hater
, and I could encompass a lot under this, like say the time the black in a Dallas hotel came into the room with a poker and wanted to blow me and I opened my blade and sat there and when he got close I lifted it and showed it to him saying, “Oh, be careful, you might
CUT
yourself!” and he ran from the room with these pig squeals. This kind of stuff is drab to anybody but me, but look you get away with it by erecting a facade: you tell them while all this was going on you had D. H. Lawrence’s collected works in your suitcase. I bullshit too much. But I’d like to try it eventually. I have a lot of loose language inside of me.

O.K. to put address with essay. I can handle writers and callers by breaking their hearts and their arms. I do quick work. cheap.

By the way, nobody has sent me $500 to do a novel yet, which is really one hell of a relief. I might find out I can’t write a novel. This way is easier. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

January 25, 1965

the alka seltzer’s sparkling and down it goes. depressed fit of cut cat running by without a tail where it had a tail before, or my head is strung like beads around a savage day. All that crap. Anyhow, I have been drinking too much, and on top of that—another kind of mess, and the time has gone by and I haven’t done anything, I am ashamed, I am lazy, I am stupid, I am King Kong bending over for a button, I am a torn picture postcard of East Bermuda.

yes, if you get to feeling you want to use any excerpts from any of the letters, lay to it. And don’t worry about defamation of character. I have nothing to hide and anything I say in a letter goes anywhere anytime, and if they don’t like the taste of it, let them suck empty beer bottles. or their bloody thumb’s footprint.

I will submit something for your mimeo series of indecent literature (wild-hair mad talk; not poetry) and if you want to use my name on a circular, go ahead. My only hope is that you will like what I do well enough to print it. My tigers sometimes stumble like mice in wine cellars. But I will probably not be able to write you anything until I get back from New Orleans in late March, early April, after helping Webb wind up
Crucifix
. There’s a matter of a few more poems, signing pages, drinking beer and pounding nails, walking the streets at night and moving in and out of the taverns looking for the man without a head, asking the question, waiting for the white bull that smiles. I will do you something for you. A welsh fandango that will clean the fingernails of your soul. o o oh. [* * *]

don’t worry about the “bandwagon”; if I’m riding a bandwagon then I guess this blood on my gut is only ketchup and the stones over the heads are only the aria of a multi-color dream that can be snapped off like a carnation. I get all the bayonets when I walk out of the door; I move through them like fields of wild flowers, saying hello to half-buddies, punching time clocks, snarling at supervisors. The young girls look the other way: I spit through a hole where a tooth has rotted out, let the belt out a notch and move on through, and I come back in dazed, punched-out, fooled again, tricked again, wasted again, and the old woman glares at me as I peel the celluloid from the pint of rye and move between the sheets far from the glory of the lucky soldiers and the green-eyed crapshooter. If I am riding a bandwagon, let me get off. The zone of sharpshooters still surround me and they pick me off little by little while humming patriotic hymns and eating bumblebees.

if the world digs me it is only to bury me.

I resent anybody being published because he has a name and only because he has a name, and this is being done much, and I don’t understand it, and it’s more fag and fart and drag and death, and
Poetry Chicago
is good at it; almost everybody’s good at it—publishing name crap when meanwhile some young artist is on fire all flame flame flame
FLAME
and they let him burn away to knife or razor across the string of wrist or throat while Mr. X-somebody dulls the screams with flat verse on flat-printed expensive paper. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

Early February 1965

Any drawings or fanciness are not going to be worth a Negro’s shitola here to you, but what drew me to your mimeo outfit (
Ole
) was that I thot you were a hard-muscled brain of a drunk laboring lost son-of-a-bitch without a chance like I am.

I can’t do you a foreword because if I did you a foreword (on these grounds) there would also be other people I should do a foreword for also.

Look, you are not that great and neither am I—and I don’t know where next month’s rent or tomorrow’s poem is coming from.

I’ve been drunk for several days (am drunk now) trying to figure how to answer you.

Sorry on the heart-attack thing. But most of us who write don’t live too long because we eat ourselves up one way or the other. [* * *]

There are 3 poems here, in this order:

But wait before you inter me with the bones of hard-head disbelievers—

Certainly, I’m drunk and certainly I’m mad, but, also, most certainly, my word won’t make your poetry good or your wife and children love you, and, hell, you know this, you’ve known it a long time. And I don’t have to get drunk to tell you and you shouldn’t force me to get drunk to tell you—no matter
what
you think of your poetry or any poetry or anybody else’s poetry.

I hate to speak like a knowing prick from a pulpit, yet you’ve put me up in the pulpit, and shit! I’ve fallen down drunk from there, and I can’t help you, I can’t help myself. [* * *]

 

The adverse review by A. Frederick Franklyn that upset Cuscaden, publisher of
Run With the Hunted,
appeared in
Grande Ronde Review,
Fall 1964
.

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[February 10, 1965]

[* * *] look, just went out to get mail and here’s two letters from Cuscaden, the last airmail and about an attack on me (review of
Run with the Hunted
by a. frederic franklyn (his lower case) and Cus quite upset about it, says freddy boy gets “almost hysterical; every low blow known to man (dig such lines as ‘the suspiciously effete contemporaries’!)” “This bastard’s harangue amounts to a disgusting, personal sort of thing…” says Cuscaden. I’ve got to write Cuss a letter and buck him up. He tells me that Freddy boy went on for 5 and ½ pages. As you know, Franklyn is with
Trace
and May’s right hand agent. I don’t go well in Los Angeles I guess (at least, that). Once I was over at May’s, brought my own liquor and got blasted. I get nasty sometimes this way and May later phoned me and said, “You couldn’t have meant those things you said about me; you must have been talking to a face on the couch, just somebody you saw sitting there. And nobody’s ever acted
that
way in my house!” Christ, maybe I smashed a few glasses against the wall, I don’t know. I know some weeks later when I was sitting in jail on a drunk rap and looking for somebody to bail me out (20$), the money was on my dresser but I had lost my wallet, and since I am a loner I was dialing long shot chances—May was one, and when I got him he told me: “I can’t help you. I am entertaining a man from India.” The shits have me wired for destruction. May knows the book reviewer of the
Times
(L.A. newspaper) and when the last issue of
Coastlines
came out the reviewer listed the names of all the writers appearing in there—except one. Sure, Bukowski. accident? maybe. accidents have been happening to me all my life. I never belonged and never will, and in a sense, I am proud of this. the only shit who can destroy me is myself, and that is when I start writing as bad as they think I am writing, or as bad as I think they are writing. I remember when I bought May the fifth he took it into the kitchen and every time I wanted a drink of my own whiskey I had to ask for it, and I was drunk or I wouldn’t have been there anyway, and I believe I remember starting on him then: “Why do you use all that fancy vocabulary?” and so forth. Sweetheart, they are always axing me because I don’t smile pretty or come to their tea parties. This poet Sherman came by the other week and he said, “I’ve got your archenemy out in the car.” I didn’t ask him who my archenemy was—it’s a kind of nebulous thing with yellow teeth and a swimming pool that I sometimes think of…. anyhow, what was I saying about
Ole
?

Please thank Nathan for the drawings. he’s got a good touch.

yes I’ll submit something for your book series if I don’t go mad or crazy or dull, but yes, first N.O, and beer with Webb, and walking the mighty wooden nightstreets full of hammerheaded whores and newsboys and rats and grifters; 5 will get you 30 that I will carry around a basket of torturous legless writhing hangovers with black rotting hearts of apples in their mouths, but this is the game we play, in this we rape little girls in the upper branches of palm trees while reading the life of Richard Wagner. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

February 16, 1965

[* * *] yours was a fine letter, baby. we don’t think exactly alike but I never have any trouble understanding you, which is more than I can say for Shakespeare. you, if something doesn’t get you first, are going to be a pretty good writer, maybe a great one. well, hell, this doesn’t flush the turds away or keep you out of the factory, does it? I don’t know: we get slammed and slammed and slammed so much that it almost feels good. I have run through quite a few women but there was never a child to hold it still. But the women are essentially the same. they look into your soul long enough and it’s not changing to fit their fingers so they began the chant, the protest bit: