Screams From the Balcony (40 page)

I owe most of the heart of anything decent in me to the streetwalkers of America.

don’t get me wrong. there are a lot of savages out there. killers. shits. dopes. sub-normals. liars. but I mean you get hold of the one or 2 good women out there and Harvard is toilet paper, Blaz. I’ve been lucky. I only met one but she taught me where my arms were and my mind and my cock and my heart, q.t., wuz. I hope to write a novel about her someday but I don’t think I am man enough to do it yet. I may never be able to do it. if I can live to be 60? I hope to call the book simply
Whore
. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

January 2, 1967

the f.b.i.? what the hell? they really think we’re porno? lot of other places they should (?) could go. must be something else that is bothering them and they use the porno as a left jab, as an excuse. what might be bothering them is that we are possibly creating life and nothing makes the dead more angry than this. that has to be it, sweetie. but relax, we are as clean as a desert bone. I guess you never thought your little mimeo machine could make J. E. Hoover twitch in his sleep. secretly you ought to be proud. of course, wives never understand such a thing—they feel it threatens their security, I mean the everyday things: supper, laundry, t.v., the funnies, the fuck, the picnic, the drive to Aunt Sarah’s. but I know you can put her straight. [* * *]

 

The review mentioned in the next letter of Louis Zukofsky’s
A Test of Poetry
appeared in Ole no. 7
(May 1967).

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

January 12, 1967

6 teeth pulled today, so stayed here tonight and wrote the review on Zukofsky. use it if you want to. I am bleeding like a river of shit and I guess I shouldn’t get any beer, will swallow blood, haha, and cold beer will scream the holes in my jaw, old daddy getting there, there are only so many teeth to be pulled then I am
FREE
. ya. guy going to build me a bridge. will try to hold onto my remaining teeth a while. don’t know how I will pay him but we never discuss this thing. very nice. I think he was drunk, he sang all the time he was working, and one tooth just didn’t want to come out and he screamed
STUPID THING, STUPID TOOTH
! what’s all this talk about teeth? came out and smashed my tail light against a phone pole. poor old ’57. I told those people I wouldn’t eat any walnuts but maybe if I warm up the beer…??? anyhow, Zukofsky in here, and hope you are making it through the days, you know like killing a bull every ten minutes or being put in a gunnysack with 14 monkeys. how do
we
last, old man? sometimes I think that we are braver than all the armies of history, and then I know that’s stupid: the armies don’t count, and we hardly do. except to the walls, a couple of faces and our own way of waiting. I am down to 4 codeine but that should get me through the night. knives, pliers, hospitals. watch out for spiders.

P.S. no arrival of
F.B.I.
rather disappointed.

[To Ann Menebroker]

January 19, 1967

[* * *] have been down, the old depressive hackdown, plus sickness, mine, Marina’s and so forth, meanwhile working the hateful job, old stuff, but time all sliced to small sections of stumbling into a room and turning on a light and falling down. meanwhile there are a half dozen poems I wrote while drunk that I haven’t yet lifted up off of paper. I mean, all I have to do is type them up but I can’t get to that. no tragedy but a buzz in the dome. and down at work a foreman leans behind me and says, “I want more work out of you, Bukowski, I want some production!” and I am dreaming of the lame bones under earth, the whole earth threaded with the bones of the dead—what a halloween. and then my little girl gets her foot caught in the rear spokes of a bicycle that her mother rides her around in in a little box in back, and I told the woman much earlier, “I hate the god damned bike, it stinks of tragedy I wish you wouldn’t ride her in the thing.” but no, she insists, but when all fucks up she runs to me with the mutilated kid. next it will be the whole stack of them in the middle of the street run over by a Falcon or something. but if you suggest that a woman should not do a certain thing she will insist upon doing it—thinking it proves that she has independence and a soul, but verily all it proves is that she is an asshole. well, let that be. but getting the kid to a doctor did get rid of an almost continuous cold, pen shots and liquid. but like I say.

so now, even as I write this it is time to go back to work. and even at work I am sliced with jackasses. I have a half hour to eat, I get a table by myself—a tough job. and here some nit catches my eye and brings over his tray: “I just hate to see somebody sitting alone,” he smiles. “I really don’t mind at all,” I tell him. “well, I’ll sit down anyhow.” “yes,” I say, “tell me your troubles.” and he does. he tells me he was somewhere or other, babysitting or something, and somebody gave him 2 cans of beer and he got high right away, he fell asleep, and the next day Sunday he slept almost all day, those 2 cans of beer. this was the essence of his conversation. I grunted something and tried to eat during his cold turkey insanity. I finished and excused myself and went outside in the freezing cold in my shirtsleeves and stood out there for 5 minutes and then went inside, back to my foreman.

so then, I know you have your things too. it’s not the large tragedies that moil us to pieces—we are fucking well ready for those. it’s the little scratchings and drippings, the continuous stubbing of the toes and elbows, the car that won’t start, the piece of tooth that breaks off as you are biting into a peach, dirty stockings, a sudden face in the market goring your peace like a bull, a ring in the bathtub, constipation, insomnia, a dirty newspaper, toothpaste too sweet, a fingernail flipping back and ripping from the finger…these things again and again, the similar small biting donnybrook continuous hail…these tear us to the final pieces. ah ha.

 

James Lowell was the proprietor of Asphodel Books, Cleveland, an important dealer in underground and little press items in
the sixties. When he was prosecuted for dealing in obscenity, a large number of leading authors contributed to a collection
A Tribute to Jim Lowell
(Cleveland, June 1967) to help raise funds for his defense
.

 

[To Carl Weissner]

January 27, 1967

[* * *]—yes, I wrote an essay in defense of Lowell, literature, art, us, we’uns…. the vise closes in. the
F.B.I.
questions Blazek, asks about me. Richmond out on bail, bookstore still open, and he’s awaiting trial. yes, they picked up my
The Genius of the Crowd
at Lowell’s. d.a. levy who published that, and other things now hiding from the police, warrant out for him. but the police have not knocked at my door (about
these
matters) because all they have on me is that I write in a very plain and simple style and don’t even cuss too much—I am too god damned fucking mother fucking tired to cuss! [* * *]

I do not make it too well with the women because I refuse to throw them the smoke screen, and I really do not get enough good ass and I never will because if a woman’s soul is a sack of shit I will not fail to tell them so, esp. when I am drunk. there are 2 new women on my horizon now, hungry-eyed, trying to act decently human but they are really not decently human. I don’t mind that they are filled with snot and piss and shit and blood, with the newspaper print pasted above their eyebrows—it is the eventual explosive unfolding, the sharp claws stored in the coffee can. “hey, son, I gave you some pussy, now kiss my ass, run my errands, listen to my harpy song.” oye, oye, oye. [* * *]

I am sure Marina will make me feel better tonight. we have a direct line going. everything is simple and clear and magic and even funny.—your daughter? on back of pic? the date? 1944? is this correct? how
OLD ARE YOU
, Abraham? [* * *] I have to go over and get Marina now; she looks almost
exactly
like the photo you enclosed, even has a hat like that. thanks the photo. it cheered me.

I don’t know if I am glad I left Germany or not. I really think I would be dying wherever I was at. my formula remains the same-keep the last coal glowing long as possible. no sense in tossing in. make them come to us. we will throw the scabs, the guts, the pebbles in their faces, whatever they use for faces.

so now in the old car, the night streets, myself gagging in the love of their tranquil yawn, my los angeles non-people. Marina how do you live in this city? [* * *]

[To Carl Weissner]

[January 28, 1967]
the next day following earlier
letter (1967)

hello Carl:

this quick one, follow up, trying to fight off Marina who won’t let me type long (competition), but I screwed up—the photo is evidently of you, and I called it your daughter—so now I’ve put a dent in your mulch—sorry—but why in hell do they dress little boys like little girls and then hand the photo to a guy with a hangover? the 1944 makes sense to me now. should I consider you wounded forever? don’t be. I wish I looked like my daughter. now she’s making a train. I hold a conversation with her as I type: “Are you making a train? ah, fine, hum hum. oh, did the train fall down?” Bukowski gone soft as poached eggs for ulcer patients. I always used whiskey for my stomach—I mean my ulcers—got rid of my stomach and my ulcers too.

heard from Greg who got the bundle of
Earth Rose
I slipped past the
F.B.I.
—Richmond busted for these—and now Dan is walking around hanging them in public places, like Spellman’s crapper, so forth. a very energetic fellow. I always picture him with knife in bloody teeth, working upon the Fall and Decline of Empire, which ain’t a bad idea. only I am lazy and mixed up with spondees and beer and bad health. all revolutionaries should be 6 feet 5, weight 380 pounds, look like young Gregory Peck with Heidelberg scars, and never be bothered with constipation, insomnia or the search for employment in the capitalistik nestegg. by the way, I hear that the Heidelberg scars are coming back. saw a perfectly bloody set in a mag, I mean photos of the faces directly afterwards, the faces of the lucky boy who collected his scar, and the hogfaces, the cementfaces, the lustfaces of the onlooking club members. you live in a hot town, old man.
ACTION
. the reason I am reading this mag which is a kind of sex-sadist outlay is that somebody sends it to me, regards an article, portion of which reads: “It’s possible that the New Bohemia stands on wobbly legs so far as terminology is concerned. It’s possible that the New Bohemia is not avant-garde at all, but merely an appendage of beatism at best, and perhaps even the ‘rear guard’ of that social phenomena. Take a look at the heroes of the beatniks of the sexy Sixties have chosen. They include Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, LeRoi Jones, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Dylan, Bertolt Brecht, John Cage, Eugene Ionesco, W. H. Auden, Anais Nin, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, to name a few.” so there I am put in my place, but of the names mentioned I am only partially in tune with a few. (now they are going to give me Bruckner’s 9th. and a bit of Hindemith.) Genet in portions when he doesn’t creampuff out in love with his writing, Brecht in portions, and the very early Auden. and I doubt very much if I am any man’s hero. as the mass goes down to a generalized and easy death there seem to be at the same time more and more individual people springing out of rosebushes with lushlife fire to make me wonder—3 or 4 months ago I had not heard of either you or D[an] G[eorgakas], now my mailbox is on fire with loveletters from hell. not as an act of writing a letter—but as information from the center of the sky to keep me from cutting my throat. [* * *]

woman from Sacramento just phoned. she says she likes to hear my voice. wow wow. I’d sure like to help her. I’m told she’s a looker. writes me 2 or 3 letters a week. she also writes poetry. god damn just dropped a cigar ash on my only good pair of pants and before I could get the damn thing up I burned a hole in the pants, and a hole in the leg. but the pants, that’s what hurts. constant tragedy. ah, me. but these letters from Sacramento. little scrawls, tired: “it rained today. I cleaned the house. 2 poems accepted by X. one of them is about you.” I keep this gal going in a kind of haywire way, and it’s kind of sloppy and bites me in the back of the neck, but I try to remain the fucked-up human I am. everybody needs help and I like to help them: especially good-lookers with sexy voices who have read more than the morning paper. luckily for me, she’s married, has children, and is probably disillusioned with her husband because he does not have fits, does not brood in the closet. a lot of guys marry these gals with poetic backgrounds because they think they are getting a chance at class, when all they are really getting is a pain in the ass. I have spoken. then too, these poetic bitches with looks always (almost always, I have found by
my
experiences) marry money-makers and then
WONDER WHY MONEY-MAKERS ARE SUCH DULL STUPID PRICKS WHEN THEY ARE JUST SITTING AROUND NOT MAKING MONEY
. so both sides are disillusioned, and the bitch sits around looking at her husband and ends up trying to write a novel on character-disintegration (
his
, of course!). in fact, I got a letter from my x-wife who writes me every Christmas, and she said she is going to write
TWO
novels on character-disintegration. mine, I suppose, and her present husband’s. now, if she
could
write about
hers
…twice…she wouldn’t have any classics, but maybe a couple of best sellers.

(this quick letter to tell you I am sorry I called you your daughter in 1944. in 1967.)

this has been a better weekend. last weekend there were about 12 different people here, and although I tried to treat them straight, easy, I might have been a bit weary, nasty and downright cruel, hahaha, and I haven’t had all these people here this weekend, so I guess I know what I am doing. unless I can get at my piano (typewriter) an hour or so each day I am not worth a shit to anybody. not that I am creating anything immortal, although now and then I may slip over
that
line (?) but it is mostly the sound of the typer like
ENGINE
/////////
MY ENGINE MY ENGINE GOD DAMN IT
, and when they shut my motor off I am no better than a hockshop owner. hey,
there’s
a good beginning: suppose Dan G. and I went around assassinating all the hockshop owners, as many as we could until they got us? Dostoyevsky would say no. and it
wouldn’t
change a beetle. and when I have been broke the hockshop owners always looked
good
to me even when they gave me almost nothing for something—because you see, nobody else
would
. it meant food or rent. to hell with the loss. so even vultures are sometimes useful. although I might agree with Dan that there
might
be a better way of helping the poor and the disowned. like say, a gun to begin with, and a gun to end with. the good thing about G. is that he is not just another standard faded commmie liberal pissedoff nuerotic anarchist, carbon copy like. he speaks from an
ORIGINAL FRAMEWORK
springing from the gut-soul of his breathing and wanting to breathe. he suggests that one of the reasons the F/B/Itch is fucking with me in the background is that I am corresponding with him. I consider that correspondence as a joy and an honor, sunlight and orange juice—it is Marina walking across the room bringing me a bottle of beer. about D., tho, I am afraid for him in the sense that he seems to feel the
NEAR READINESS OF UPHEAVAL
. things like Watts, so forth. the French Revolution. the Russian. me, I am not ready to mount the parrapets. I am a shit. I remember the 30’s, the depression, the same talk—tho not as creatively sensible and warm as Dan’s—and nothing happening. almost 40 years later and nothing happening. in fact, due to the ultra black Romanticism of the easily excited intellectuals (Camus to start with, Malcolm X to end with) the swing has gone way back to the
RIGHT
, and it is further away from them than ever. there are 2 very sad things to see in the world at least, and 2 of them are a very old queer and a very old revolutionary. man, hold, I have worked in the mills for their pennies, the fat capitalists, I have been drained drained and slugged and slugged and cheated, and Dan says bodies must go on the line and he means it, but we’ve first got to get enough bodies with stuffings, each with its own voice not somebody elses.
YOU CAN ALWAYS PUT NEW GOVERNMENTS ON TOP OF MEN; WHAT WE NEED IS NEW MEN ON TOP OF GOVERNMENTS
. the only way government (or no government) can work is through living men, and I am afraid we do not have enough of these around right now. this does not mean that I am for injustice against dead men, for even dead men have rights—mainly because they still feel pain, get hard-ons, have bellies.