Screams From the Balcony (28 page)

 

The books by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Burroughs that Bukowski lists below were in fact in print in 1965. Carl Larsen’s Plot to Assassinate…was published by Seven Poets Press in 1962
.

 

[To Jim Roman]

August 14, 1965

[* * *] my god, I know, I know little about Patchen, I know the
name
, and that’s all. this is the hell of it with people who come out in small chapbooks, small books of poetry, editions of 200-500. they are soon swept up and the years go by, and then there’s just the sort of a ring of a name somewhere. I’d like to see some publisher reissue some of these—
Howl, On the Road, Gasoline, the Naked Lunch, The Plot to Assassinate the Chase Manhattan Bank, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
…I don’t have any of these myself except the last one. and then there’s Patchen. and what he has written, drawn. Maybe
Outsider
#4 will throw some light where it’s needed. [* * *]

it’s been searing hot here for a week running, between 95 and 100. race riots in the streets. stores burning and looted, automobiles burning; whites and police beaten. whole blocks on fire. fireman shot at. all hell. I guess they’ll clean their area out and then come up here looking for me. I’ve got my black face ready, ready. “
Mammy! Mammy
!” “motha-fucka!” of course, I’ve got nothing for them to steal except a couple of books of poetry but I’m surrounded by a lot of white meat they’d just love to beat on. hell, I know they’ve had it rough; I have too. the only difference being that they want a lot of things that I don’t want. anyhow, it’s hot and there’s FUN in town. they caught a white guy the other night and beat him, beat him until one of his eyes was hanging from a thread out of the socket. I keep thinking it’s a good thing the whites didn’t do this to a
BLACK
or there’d be a national uproar. the whole thing, I think, is just the human monster showing teeth, shitting upon itself every chance it gets. the social workers and professors can talk about conditions and background and all the big glib vacant words, but it’s just the human-thing with hands and feet and bloody flat brain and soul letting go in another direction. shit will always find a direction out, and if it doesn’t, they’ll operate or blast it out. I mean black shit, white shit, brown shit, yellow shit. I need me a wall, oh, I need me a 12 foot wall. with beer inside, with me inside. oh, I need me a 12 foot wall.

well, like I said, it’s hot and we’re all a little off in the noodle today. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

[August 15?, 1965]

[* * *] this is Sunday. I’ve drunk about 2 six packs tall and still feel quite sober although I am gradually growing deaf. will be 45 years old on the 16th., my god my god my god. don’t think I don’t remember being young—the bars, the fights, the alleys, everything—refusing marriage, work, country, culture, literature, the sum total. now I sit trapped in a little by everything; the heart got soft, I slipped here and there, finally. and that’s how they trap the fox and the madman.

I wonder about you out there and I know that you have been going through your own particular type of
HELL
, the Blatt thing, the factory, everything, and that I have been very little use to you. I am sorry; mostly I only write poems, and many of these—as you know—not so good. Want-ling tells me this and you tell me this about
Crucifix
, and I know that it is true. I knew that when I was down there in New Orleans, I knew I sensed that old man Webb wanted more and better poems but I couldn’t do it. I just kept wandering the streets a drunken jackal of self, wandering drunk, and I could not come up with it. and then they charge $7.50 a copy; well, they had their makeup and format and their artist—only the poet dipped between the slabs. so fuck it. I’ve died before. why lift me upside-down? why strain at me? I think that what might have held the pages down was a more clever poet, practiced. I only mourn and dip within my own ink tears. I don’t know the rules. and I get the side whispers around here from the woman’s poetry-group finks who slip in through the doors while I am asleep? “he’s slipped.” “urn, this is really not as good as
It Catches
.” so, what the hell do they want? we all slip. we slip all the way into the grave and then we stretch out straight and no more vomit no more bluebirds no more busrides to East Kansas City and a blow job by a maid with a lisp and a big ass for 3 dollars. the woman now in here sliding a big knife into a mayonnaise jar, clank clank clank, smiling a sunlight smile and not realizing that I am writing to the great Blazek. hello to Alta, by the way, and that I’d suggest that she hang close, you’ll make it, hell, you’ve got to, jolly old chopper, I’d like
you
at my funeral, don’t you see? a few sharp mad words. are you still there? all right, I’ll no longer ask you to “hold” but you must have known what I meant when I said it. the other night, coming out of the slave pit, here was this long freighter load behind an electric motor dragging this body, one ball here one ball there, cock sliding into the moon, asshole like a gnome, fingers and arms spitting at the sky, a letter to mother in the back pocket like a dirty sex picture, some bum had gotten caught and dragged beneath the wheels…blood of course, the human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness…a dirty game…and a voice shouted out:
STOP THE TRAIN
!

later, after they examined the shreds, they found it was o.k. “Just a transient,” they said.

just think if it had been a United States congressman. or president Johnson. but to my mind this man could have easily been a better man than any of them. and probably was. and this is the insaneness of our times: that only what you
KNOW
or are
TOLD ABOUT
can be hurt. all else is either shit or the enemy or useless. says who? what the fuck is this? I am getting tired of it. [* * *]

I almost never think of suicide anymore. what would be the sense in killing this cuckold, this fat demented flabby body, this distilled eye, this color of
YELLOW
. I’ve got a yellow streak running up and down my back that would make the Sahara Desert look like a children’s sand pile. else I would have killed myself long ago.

 

so here I sit like a shit

writing a 23 year old kid I never met

and I get drunkeran drunker

and jam the beer down down

the sunlight is all gone

and the cigars too

I go to the woman’s cigarettes

and light one after the other

like a jackal imbecile

and I don’t know where I am

and a small light burns over my head

a touch of endurance up there

and it makes me almost smile

but the world’s out there humming

and the world’s not right for me

which makes me a de-balled oxen in the

poverty of myself

and that’s sweet enough for me

and I lift the beercan and

drink.

 

what I mean is, kid, where do we from here? relief rolls? the bloody razor blade? Eartha Kitt, that voice, through a foggy radio? that foreman’s face like God, cut from wood, from glass, seeming to know but knowing nothing nothing…and so, such poor fuckers as you and i? you and I? we turn to the immortals and the immortals hand us a hot turd, the smell of shit. what a sweet mad game! tricked all the way.—and the most famous poets of our Age, they appear in the pages of the New Yorker, silk white, and you read the poems again and again; and the poems say

NOTHING
.

except they are kinda nice. eyow eee yes. how they work the word. this takes training and culture. not everybody can do this. the slip of the word like the knife into Caesar.

let me make up a New Yorker poem as drunk as I am I asshole may not get it, anyhow—

 

mass effusion darkens my brain—

Clymentia, where are you—

with the silver goatherd

or emptying the glass of

me?

swish, swish the coattails of the

Ark, never by god gone never gone

by god, sweet please, Clymentia,

the dark boys coming over the hill

into a machinegun fire

that would moon-strike gorgeous

teacups from

Georgia to Abeline.

 

and so on. this they consider poetry because it’s pretty and it’s a con game and they think that we
CAN’T
write it, but we can, we simply refuse to, we simply refuse to give more to an Age that already stinks like an old garbage can, and that after Pound there has to be somebody and after Eliot there has to be somebody, and it’s a shame but—Ginsberg, Corso, the rest have been sucked in playing their entrails across the applause of the crowd, and they are dead and they know that they are dead, it’s useless, they’ve skipped across listened to the applause of half-drunk freaks too long too long, too long have they taken the bait, and I think of one of Corso’s poems: “I Hate Old Postmen!” this sounds nice, but I predict that when Corso reaches the age of 45 he won’t be writing at all. of course, I will be dead so it won’t matter. but the Ginsberg, Corso crew (and they write well) will die because they can’t resist the delicacy of being forever known forever touched forever heard
NOW
before 20, 18, 45 people applauding their stuff. they are weak and lack
STEEL GUT
. I learned in barrooms of the world who the men were. those who spouted the worst were the lousiest fighters. the quiet man was always another kind of job. I don’t want to talk like Hemingway, but my face is not only scarred because of disease. I’ve caught some good ones.

I am an ugly man, surely, but I’ve also learned that there other kinds of ugliness; and that some beatings that I have taken in alleys, or from a friend across the room, these do not diminish me.

Blaze god damn it, I am
SORRY SORRY
I could not help you in the Blatt thing. fuck poetry. poetry makes me vomit. and I am tired of fights on the front lawn. I’ve had enough of that Hemingway stuff to last me 300 years, 2 men on the front lawn punching the living shit out of each other, blood going, we should be punching Johnson right into his fat Texas map for killing us
all
, for trying to be a shadow of Frankie D. what a tent show we put on, eh?

and then we open the
New Yorker
and here’s one of the Dickey boys—who knows the difference.—

of course, I keep getting drunker and drunker and this makes less and less sense.

I think I’ll chop it off and just fall forward over the keys.
BROOKS TOO BROAD FOR LEAPING
. good night, babe.

[To Douglas Blazek]

August 24, 1965

the shits around here all discussing the race riots but they are all in the limbo theory, hacking around and vomiting all over their minds and enjoying it listening to the sounds of their own voices, but they are all cotton, cotton-shit with paper faces worse than any halloween masks, and it all ends up like a skeleton trying to fuck a 500 pound ape-gorilla…they just don’t just can’t make it. I speak of certain friends of the woman’s who come around. my friends are different, hahah ha! the few of them. at least they don’t get out beyond the depth of a dripping cunt until they’ve thought awhile. I can’t think of thinking as an
activate
sort of thing like throwing a ball, even if you’ve studied the target a long time. thinking is very strange; mostly
it
thinks you and it takes its time. that’s why these people who warble their ideas for hours make me want to walk away from them—they are all unpacked loose. besides one of them ate my steak. I left the other night for work and here was this Stanley from her Writer’s Group warbling on the couch. he’s the one who claims that his writer’s group writes better poetry, better stuff than any of the stuff printed in the littles. and they claim they don’t send their stuff out, any of them, and that’s why you don’t see it in print. the magazines are not good enough, real enough, to recognize them. sweetheart, I have not only seen and listened to some of these but have also read some of their stuff. it is weak, weaker than weak; trivial, flat, washed-out. their egos can’t face rejection so they gather together each week, chatter and praise each other, scream at each other, haggle, and make up the dreamthing that their stuff is good. better than. anyway, I came home from work, balls-tired and looked in the refrig. “hey, where’s my steak? where’d ya put my steak?” 2 hours overtime and I was thinking of that steak sandwich and a beer and the yellow light over my head as I read the race results. “oh, Stanley ate your steak,” she said. “he can’t cook at his place and I don’t think he’s working a full-time job.” I didn’t say anything, but when that monkey starts getting into my beer and whiskey, somebody’s gona get hurt.

I wrote Henry Miller the other day to twist 15 bucks from a patron of his who promised same if I mailed Henry 3 more
Crux
. I undersell Stuart and it buys whiskey and some horsebets. like I’ve got a $70 brake repair bill. the
car
isn’t worth that. anyhow, I was drunk and inferred that Henry shake his patron out of his money tree. the 15 arrived from one source today and the Miller letter from another: partial quote: “I hope you’re not drinking yourself to death! and, especially not when you’re writing. It’s a sure way to kill the source of inspiration. drink only when you’re happy
if you can
. Never to drown your sorrows. and never drink alone!” of course I don’t buy any of this. I don’t worry about inspiration. when the writing dies, it dies; fuck it.
I drink to keep going another day
. and I’ve found that the best way to drink is to drink
ALONE
. even with a woman and a kid around, I’m drinking alone. can after can laced with a half pint or pint. and I stretch wall to wall in the light, I feel as if I were filled with meat and oranges and burning suns, and the radio plays and I hit the typer maybe and look down at the torn and ink-stained oilcloth on the kitchen table, a kitchen table in hell; a life, not a season in hell; the stink of everything, myself aging; people turning to warts; everything going, sinking, 2 buttons on shirt missing, belly working out; days of dull clubbing work ahead—hours running around with their heads chopped-off, and I lift the drink I pour in the drink, the only thing to do, and Miller asks me to worry about the source of
INSPIRATION
? I can’t look at anything, really look at anything without wanting to tear myself apart. drinking is a temporary form of suicide wherein I am allowed to kill myself and then return to life again. drinking is just a little paste to hold on my arms and my legs and my pecker and my head and the rest. writing is only a sheet of paper; I am something that walks around and looks out of a window. amen. [* * *]