Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  [* * *] 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. [* * *]

  * * *

  The review mentioned here is not listed in Dorbin’s bibliography.

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  June 24, 1963

  A little good news. Yesterday, Sunday, in the Los Angeles Times book review section, we, LOUJON PRESS and Buk and It Catches was mentioned by Jack Hirschman. Some bit about my style of writing (according to Hirschman); that the book was on the press, price of book and address of LOUJON PRESS given. Also several other books reviewed and a kind of eulogy for Creeley by Hirschman. Anyhow, we have been mentioned, and maybe a few sales because of it? It might pay to send Hirschman a review copy when the book comes out? [* * *]

  The U. gave Corrington a grand ($1,000) to lay around and write so he wouldn’t have to teach Summer School. Well, this is o.k. if you can work it. Also, I think, a $2,500 advance on his novel. He’s now thinking about going to Europe. I guess they all do that. They start running around the world. (See Ginsberg, Corso, Kaja, Burroughs, etc., etc.) I don’t know quite what it means, but I’d rather side with Faulkner who g.d. figured there was more than enough just around his doorstep. This culture hunt smacks too much of a Cadillac sort of acquisition.

  All right, hang in tough.

  * * *

  Corrington published “Charles Bukowski and the Savage Surfaces” in Northwest Review for fall 1963.

  [To John William Corrington]

  [June 1963]

  Don’t worry yourself shitty on the Northwest Review article, I understand, and I hold to the savage side with the honor of my teeth. I know damn well I don’t wax the golden poetic and I don’t try to because I believe it to be essentially outside of life—like lace gloves for a coal-stoker. On the other hand, I don’t believe in being tough because life is tough. I like my sunlight and beer and cigars and occasional pussy just like any matador or prelim boy, but there’s still room for a good symphony written in 1700 or 1800 or the disgust-strike of sadness at seeing a cat crushed flat by wheels upon asphalt. There’s room for things, and I once tried to straighten these things into REASON by reading Plato and Schope and F.N., Hegel, the whole host of boys, but I only found that they were tilting silver water, getting lost in it, and as long as I was getting lost I figured it might as well be in a cheap bar where I could listen to sounds that were not being written, and if I found love it was some other old dog’s bone. Because if the answer isn’t at the top, it isn’t at the middle, and you’ll find just as much at the bottom which was where I was at anyhow. It’s not so much savage as it is discarding the whole facade of knowledge and education and looking as directly as you can into your own sun. You can get blinded this way but at least a lot of it is your own doing. Like suicide or betting the 9 horse. The next cold drink is God, and the next cigarette isn’t cancer; it’s the next one after, the one you haven’t gotten to. And you realize all along that you are not getting very near anything, but if it’s not the razor, you toddle along like a kid shitting in its pants, and the game is corncobs and dollars and buttons and an occasional Easter candle. [* * *]

  I get touches and hints of the book from Jon, and this man and his wife weave things like a golden dream, touching it, tasting it, adding, subtracting, loving, o loving, they touch again and again the thing they are working with, it takes design, it takes them, they heave to it like good steak or a visitation by the angels; these people are blessed beyond blessedness, and my unholy mad luck has made this work of mine fall into their hands and I look through the curtains, and the cars on the street and the people and the sidewalks have become real and carved and yet soft like pillows because these people have touched me with the wand. All my luck came at once, and it won’t last, I don’t want it to. There will be a time of looking back, and I am ready. I came out of absurdity and I will go back, back, but now now all the dogs and flowers and windows laugh with me, and it is a stirring a stirring like an approaching army marching or a butterfly coming out of the cocoon. [* * *]

  I await the K. Review, and your probable 18th century sonnet. This is all right. The K. Review is good fat book, stirs with a kind of dusty knowledge and unreality, but some of the critical articles hold little strokes of lightning, the taste and stir of the good long word mixed with the near-slang. This beholds one in an amusing sort of way. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Ann Bauman]

  [mid-June, 1963]

  if you come to LA someday I hope you come to see me, part of that time anyhow. The only problem being that I work about half the weekends and the other I don’t. If you come by bus, would be glad to meet you at bus stop, or drive you anywhere around town you want to go, or if you don’t want to go anywhere we can have a beer at my place and make dull and polite conversation. However, I know that your idea is only half-resolved, a thought in between many other thoughts while things are going on, and that it prob. will not be followed through.

  I am signing pages for the book, a huge stack of purple pages arrived in a box with instructions and this Sunday I will quietly drink beer and smoke and listen to my radio and look out the window and sign the pages.

  Webb sent me a dummy copy of the book and it is a real thing of beauty—the paper, the type, the cover etc. etc. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  July 1, 1963

  [* * *] If you are serious about a 2nd book to follow Outsider #4, I can say no more than that the miracles are still coming, the honor laid out like all the horses dancing in my dreams. Should you people change your minds—because of circumstances or conditions later, that will be o.k. too. I’ve got to go with you. YOU HAVE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO PUBLISH THE NEXT BOOK AFTER It Catches My Heart in Its Hands [dated and signed].

  This is real nice to say—as if I were giving you a break or something, after you break your backs to make me known! Don’t worry about a notary: my word is good, and when my word is no longer any good then my poetry won’t be either. I’m glad to go with you, much more than glad; you are my kind of people. Not a bunch of phoney literary bullshit or slick-assed business people, but people in love with their work and their lives, asking nothing but enough to continue to stay alive in order to continue to do the thing.

  Your danger after putting me out in such fine style in It Catches would not be from the little chapbook operators but from the big boys, the bigger publishers, who might think I would go. But they can go to hell. I’m with you, and same arrangements with 2nd book, no royalties, but would like some copies. I’m afraid, tho, we w
ill never come up with such a good title again, but meanwhile I will be thinking, gently thinking of one, as I go in and out of bars or watch them run. [* * *]

  I don’t write letters…too much…anymore, because it was simply it is simply a time of no letters. It may change. But I get to thinking IT IS THE ART-FORM THAT COUNTS, and all the letter-writing in the world won’t excuse a bad poem or make it any better. Then I am still drinking, and the drinking often takes over and I don’t know quite where I am or what I am anymore. Right now this place has newspapers in it that date 3 weeks back, onion stems, beer-cans, coffeepots on the floor. This woman comes over once in a while and straightens up but then she starts in with THE INTELLIGENT TALK, and I let her win her precious little arguments, I hate haggle, but just the same I get a little sick with how PROUD people are with the mind, how they want to ram it through you like a sword, how they want to talk talk talk. Don’t they know that there is simply something nice about sitting in a room and drinking a beer and not saying much, feeling the world out there, and sitting there, sitting there, resting? [* * *]

  I will send you a tape of a poetry reading of mine I made on my machine and which was broadcast over KPFK in August 1962. Of course, they deleted a lot of vulgarity, had to, so it is not quite the same thing I sent them. They asked me to come to their studios, which is like asking me to go to church with a hangover, so instead I mailed them what I had made in my room among the beer-cans, and, lo, they accepted it and played it over the air. Jack Hirschman’s wife runs the literary and drama end of KPFK. Anyhow, when the thing finally came on over the radio…at 11:15 p.m…. I was drunk and did not hear it, but somebody retaped it off the radio and I was able to hear it afterward. [* * *]