Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  September 15, 1964

  Dear Kaja—

  All right, I know it was a drunken letter and you’ve got to stop stealing my stuff! Anyhow you said Copenhagen, so here I am writing to Copenhagen. [* * *]

  [typewritten:]

  you know, u really kant get the ingress into a WORD without the typer, the typer is the carver, the ax, the cleaver, the thing with the mouth that hollers about the bloody dice. it machineguns the mind out of penury. fuck the pen. anyhow, I am sitting around feeling my arms and legs and balls, trying to figure out if I am real or not. I must be: about 3 a.m. I wiped my ass. the sun is just right today, kind of an icy tired yellow, limp vain vaindog of a sky. bull. listen, do you know what we are trying to do? are we crazy or do we mean something with our poems, or is it children’s games, or tricks, or colored water? we gotta have blood! bloody shades in cheap hotels; mortar in the streets, shellholes! hoar-frosted wine! and young girls running wild down the streets chased by hungry dogs! my god my god, everything is so dull. even the bomb will be dull. it won’t last. we won’t last. this is profound. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW profound this is. all right, listen, don’t mess up too much in Cope.—I remain sitting in the sun, 44 years old, 3 or 4 blocks south of HOLLYWOOD, my god my god, and for it all it is a good day, I am not too sick today although I may hit the first man I meet on the street square in the face.

  * * *

  [To Ann Menebroker]

  October 25, 1964

  [* * *] have been reading Saint Genet by Sartre who turned down Nobel’s 52 grand while waiting on a cheese sandwich. S.G. badly written for most part, but good shafts of light there, involuted, and somewhat fascinating like a little box of rusty razor blades. If you have leisure to mull without tension you can pick up a big fat paperback copy for a dollar and a quarter. Genet, of course, was preceded as a robber-verse writer by Villon, who if I remember, was banned from Paris. Genet, more-like, has it made. [* * *]

  * * *

  “Snow Bracero” and 3 other poems appeared in Jacaranda 6, February 1965 (Dorbin C259-261).

  [To Joel Climenhaga]

  October 26, 1964

  I got your o.k. on the 5 poems and hope you will send me a copy of whichever Transient Press mag or mags these might appear in [* * *] “Snow Bracero” I had some fun writing, not fun but flew…something…I used to write the short story some time back but generally dislike short story on waste of wordage principle but if I can get a story line into what I consider a poem-form I am happy enough, or as happy as I will be? [* * *]

  * * *

  Douglas Blazek, notes Bukowski, “was, perhaps, the foremost leader of the Mimeo Revolution with his magazine Ole. He was also a good writer, quite prolific, and an excellent and interesting correspondent.” Blazek accepted three Bukowski poems for the first issue of Ole, initiating one of Bukowski’s most extensive and most sustaining correspondences of the 1960s.

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  [October 28, 1964]

  [* * *] fine, I got your o.k. on the 3 poems, and while I have a theory that rejection is good for the soul, the theory seems to work best when it applies to others.

  bio: born 8-16-20. began writing poetry at age of 35. 5 collections of poetry with a 6th, Crucifix in a Deathhand to be issued by Loujon Press and Lyle Stuart, Inc. early, in 1965. That’s it.

  Rough night in the pit last night, bastard on one side telling me how great he was and bastard on other side telling me how great he was, meanwhile the workwhip flashing like a cobra hung to a windmill. [* * *]

  my neck hurts. I seem to be dying of something—maybe life—or maybe no young ass. well. listen: bottom of paper here. slipping out of typer. going. hold and luck.

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  late October 1964

  got your letter, and poems enclosed for your consideration.

  luck with your mad venture, but hope you get some hard knockers (eventually) because poetry is dying on the vine like a whore on the end stool on a Monday night.

  I am snotted-up today, dismal, flu maybe, or maybe just 44 years, a lot of them drunk, anyhow all bent over and have had 2 shots for neuritis from a doc over Hollywood Blvd. who yachts to Catalina too much, and I straightened up a little. He keeps me waiting an hour each time and all I could do was peek at the cunt walking down on the street below and I got rocks but there was nothing he could give me for that.

  the woman wants to put food on this table. I’ve got to get out.

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  October 31, 1964

  well, since no pomes I mite as well untrundle the old bullshit harp, but it’s not bullshit when I say I got your tired card and know the job has you by the throat, and worn, and I send a white prayer of luck and love for whatever good it might or might not do, and yes, send a page if you get around to it, there’s nothing like being tired and tired and tired so you can’t sleep or think of hope, but if this book comes anywhere near what you did with It Catches I will know that the good angels are near you even if they refuse to do the slave-rote work of drudgery and guts. I wish I could say something to help you through except that I am so often in muddled state and tired too, but if it helps, and it might not,—a book like this lifts my life up into light whether I deserve it or not. I used to have a theory that if I could just make one person’s life happy or real that would have been otherwise, then my own life would not have failed. It was a good theory but a few whores ran me through the wringer for it, but I do think that for a while a few of them enjoyed not being spit on for a while, and so this made it o.k. for me. [* * *]

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  November 1, 1964

  [* * *] Very drunk last night. The landlord and his wife came over and we slugged it down. His wife became rather upset when she saw the kitchen and the bathroom. Frances is not a very good housekeeper. But I calmed her down and got her to insulting me. I had let some gypsies straighten out my car for $30 and she said I shouldn’t have done this. What should we do, let these people starve? There were 3 of them, 2 boys and an old man with a huge belly. They saw me typing and drinking beer at the window and came up and talked. We haggled at price a little while and then I told them to go ahead. They didn’t do a bad job. When I handed the old man the 30 he bent down over his belly, bowed and said, “God bless you, son.” I figure that was worth the 30 right there. Nobody ever said “God bless you, son,” to me before. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  November 4, 1964

  write a book? a novel? I am too lazy, too sick, and such a waste of words, and they wouldn’t print it, so why not break it down into poetic toothaches, all not so cumbersome, and I doubt I could stick to the subject, I am not that interested in any area of life or that disinterested either.

  they all go the way of novels and then there’s nothing left.

  of course, I am a whore, and if you know anybody who can advance me $500 I will do the trick because then I know I will be able to write it the way I want to, but you know and I know that nobody like this is going to come along, and so I won’t go into the cleaver, and there’s some thanks in this.

  what was I doing before the age of 35 when I began writing poetry? dying, sweetheart, dying. kind of like. you see, I started with the short story, starving in little rooms around the country and drinking too much cheap wine, and I’d mail the things out to The Atlantic Monthly or Harpers and when they came back I tore them up. I used to write 8 or 10 stories a week. All I’d do was write these stories and drink as much as possible. Then I heard of Story, Whit Burnett, and at least he sent written rejects most of the time, and I finally landed my first story there at age of 24. Then a few other places, and then the drink took over. The writing seemed foolish—a con game, a game of prigs and English teachers, a dullard’s game. I worked some of the time, very little of the time, and how I made it I really don’t know. Drinking was the god. No matter what city, what year, what time. In Philly I
used to knock on this bar door at 5:30 a.m. An old bartender used to be mopping up then prior to opening. He’d let me in and I’d sit there listening to the wet flub of the strings behind me. He gave me free drinks and he had some himself. I’d stay in that bar until closing at 2 a.m. That’s not much sleep, you’ve got to admit, but it came in handy when I was totally broke and starving—I’d climb into the sack and sleep for a week. I got kicked out of room after room for being drunk and no rent and for bringing in women late at night. There was no grand plan here, no totality of sense, I wasn’t looking for anything. It was just sunlight and rain and snow and nightmares and walking around and the drink in front of me. As I say I worked sometimes and the jobs were all bad and low paying and monotonous and searing and they still are. I am unable to do any kind of work with proficiency and have no trade. Anyhow, at 35 the drink and the women had caught up with me. I ended up in the charity ward of the local hospital spewing blood out of my mouth and ass, completely fallen apart, done. They let me lay there 2 days before somebody came along and decided I needed a transfusion. 9 pints of blood plus the glucose. They’d found out I’d picked up a blood credit somewhere. meanwhile my whore smashed up my old car in the streets.

  I came out 900 years older. Found a job as a shipping clerk somewhere and got hold of a typewriter. I started writing poems. One of the first batches I sent to a little magazine in Texas. They went. I finally ended up in Texas with 75 cents in my pocket married to the editoress whose father was a millionaire. After 2 years of marriage she decided I was a bastard and there went the million. I had begun drinking again. And writing more poems. I am still in bad shape physically and don’t know how long I can make it.

  The job I have now is no better than the rest. I am still alive. a woman just left with an 8 week old baby. they are both mine. they went for a walk. I am writing Balzac. There is a fly on the screen. now he is gone.

  this is a kind of kernel of things. a man can get bored with another man’s life. I don’t want to hang you up. but you asked.

  trick or treat? yes, I went to the door too. the woman was in the tub. here were 2 little girls with their big-assed big-titted young and sexy and silly mamas, and I stood there in my blood-stained bathrobe, open at the front, torn shorts, 3 day beard, cigar in one hand, can of beer in the other, and I stood there thinking of raping the 2 mamas, but they didn’t seem scared at all, I was just an old man in the doorway, and I turned around, put down beer and cigar, and shot the candy into their paper bags: FLOP FLIP FLAP! and they said thank you thank you and they walked off with their sexy silly mamas who were wiggling wiggling wiggling in the moonlight all on fire FIRE! and I went back in and emptied the beercan.

  the fly came back on the window screen. I swung the rolled-up newspaper and missed. you see how it goes around here.

  hot damn! I got him this time!

  the horns of grief need no honing.

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  [November 23, 1964]

  everything finally kills us from carrots to the time-clock or no time-clock at all, and it’s the faces that kill us too: faces like putty granite with raisin eyes snapped in, and the way they walk and the way they laugh and love and hate and drive their cars and piss into the diminishing areas of our lives. we are the pitiful beggars—we don’t even want the coin, we are so sick we don’t know why.

  the drink kills me and saves me too, my whole insides have fallen apart, hemorrhage Friday, coughed up a half pint of blood, but you’ve heard all this, and even now the old fingers, once again, rip down on the typer, and I listen to some rotten half-ass classical music for the in-between hammerheads who have not fallen asleep yet…don’t worry about a botched-up Ole, we are not mechanics, we are lazy, fumbling, aching from the shrill pipes and ugly whores, listen, try to get the CONTENT, that’s all. the best living poet I know of is Al Purdy, 185 Wellington St., Belleville, Ontario, Canada. (Belleville? Bensenville?) You might right him write him and tell him of Ole, hide nothing, tell him it’s only mimeo but talk a little bit about what you think (my suggestion) & ask him if he might send something rejected dejected or otherwise. It will be good. whatever it is. I have read his collection Poems for All the Annettes and I turned the pages one by one reading in a state of pisspoorpissgreatstun within myself at what he was doing. he writes like chopping down trees; he writes about those bees that are stinging the inside of his head. he lays the words down as if they were real instead of angelcake. he might not be able to send you anything for one reason or another, but I’d suggest a try??? I don’t know if he’s still at above address but I think if you try your letter will be forwarded unless he’s dead, and he was drinking a lot of homemade wine the last time I heard from him.

  I don’t expect Ole to last too long and I tell you this because I am a donkey-hard old man and it’s better you know it straight in case you haven’t guessed. The same 50 poets are writing the same crap over and over again in America. You’ll get tired of it. I am. you’ll get tired of turning the crank and taking abuse from half-talents. your wife will want love, your factory body will want rest; you will to write. the sour cream will spin up in your mouth and you will spit it out, Ole will go down the crapper.

  I tried turning the crank once at something called Harlequin, I sent 3, 4, 5, 6 page rejections to poetry that came in, talking about everything from big-assed women to T. S. Eliot and what came back?: WHO THE HELL ARE YOU? they wrote, I’VE NEVER SEEN YOUR NAME ON ANY OF THE LITTLE MAGAZINES ANYWHERE? WHAT GIVES YOU A RIGHT TO TELL ME HOW TO WRITE? HORSE-SHIT! etc. I was surprised at the venom. these people reminded me more of traffic-cops, bankers, foremen, factory owners, clerks, teachers, and I guess…that is what they were. But I hadn’t suggested to them HOW to write, I’d only suggested why I didn’t care to print that particular group of poems. I never claimed to be a poet. I claimed to be some type of editor who intended to print some type of thing when it came along, but, only once or twice did it come along. I stopped cranking or my wife divorced me, or anyhow, that’s past. but it wasn’t long before I was drunk again at high noon, fallen down in back alleys with dogs sniffing at my feet to see if I was alive or kids poking sticks in my back to see if I was alive and truck drivers pulling up short and getting out to look and see if I were still alive. What decision, they arrived at I don’t know. also, my grammar hasn’t improved since then and spelling is harder than fucking when you don’t want to while intoxicated. [* * *]

  There is nothing worse than talking about poetry or poets or ourselves, is there? It keeps us from doing the thing. It keeps us from the knife, maybe, or the red hot poem blue flame smashing, through the wall hollering blowing bugle & slobbering the real good tears that will bring all the priests and whores and clouds and garage mechanics and Sir Winston Churchill into the same quiet bar to talk about mice and waste and grass and towers and strange things like people with beautiful eyes, fine candy bars, new symphony music or the great color of the bartender’s shirt. [* * *]

  * * *

  Bukowski’s review of Layton’s Laughing Rooster appeared in Evidence no. 9.

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  [December 1, 1964]

  [* * *] all drab, drab, and it’s that kind of day, drizzle, damnation, the plants heave and puff in air that has no air, the plants sweat and the screens crawl with the one or 2 stupid lost flies of summer, who have somehow failed to find a spider, who have somehow failed to die, my 12 weeks old daughter wails in the other room; her cries cut through all my poems, all my writing, but she is a sweetie, they have not gotten to her yet, she is all eyes and skin, she bends, she bubbles…she wails. now the old woman comes in with the kid and she sits in a chair at my elbow, as I type and she has the kid and the radio plays In the Clock Store, badly, and I’d like to say., Listen, don’t you realize that I AM WRITING TO BLAZEK! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO BROADS? (do you hear the cuckoo? she asks. do you hear the alarm clock? she asks.) well, kid, there has always been something, some woman screami
ng for a bottle of wine or the landlord at the door for his rent or the police with a passkey or God’s left-handed angel stealing my cigarettes from the dresser. well, this will be a lousy letter. sometimes I stand a better chance. Sometimes she is busy with something important—like reading a New Yorker in the other room.

  I remember one, this one was a looker, I was drunk all the time and how I made it I’ll never know, or I will, the horses were going very well this year and a half, I could do no wrong: I didn’t know what I was doing, just one long run of luck (good) and I drank it drank it and kept going to bed with this woman with all that body, and I remember one night I drank so much (I had been hitting it at the track all day) that I fell off the couch and I was down there on the floor and I saw these LEGS smooth cool nylon magic filled down into those spikes, my god, magic, and that placid face looking down at me and she was smoking and I saw the earrings and I could feel the rug on my neck and the whole world swirling around: buildings full of janitors, jails full of quiet men held in a web, alleys of murder, swans asleep on lakes and I looked up at her from the floor and I said: I’M A GENIUS AND I’M THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD WHO KNOWS IT!

  Blazek, she looked at me for maybe 20 seconds and then she said YOU DAMN FOOL, GET UP FROM THE FLOOR!

  and she was right and I did get up, I laughed and walked over and poured myself a glass of whiskey and looked at those legs. electricity yellow and whiskey yellow and nylon colored legs. she’s dead now and the legs do not look so good anymore but I can’t blame her for that.