Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  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:

  “Why to you always laugh at yourself? Why do you always make fun of yourself?”

  (no answer.)

  “I can’t stand a man who doesn’t like himself.”

  (no answer.)

  “Why don’t you quit that god damned job, then?”

  (no answer.)

  “You think I don’t feel trapped too?”

  (no answer.)

  “You’re jealous. There are many people I like better than I like you and you can’t understand this.”

  (no answer.)

  Yes yes, if you have the special interview issue of Lit. Times I do wish you’d mail it. why they refuse to mail me one when I send $ I don’t know. guilt? they feel, somehow, I guess as if they’ve ruptured or fucked me. they shouldn’t worry—everytime I step out the door 4 thieves and a bloody toothed cocksucker dog chase me around the block. ah.—the circular is sweetfire (Ole ad), and it sure as hell creates an interest, and talking about me in the same hairbreath as Whitman and Rimbaud gives lift to this sagging soul so torn by complaining bitch of woman, and I allow myself a small lift, a splash of water in the eye, a cool can of beer as 45 pigeons circle in the lot across the street, and the mountains are dark today dark, and they are dropping lumber ripping lumber tearing holes in the ground, and a man sits on an orange machine lighting a cigarette and where one hour ago I could see a house from this small kitchen window, I now see matches of misery where there were once dark halls to walk down in order to piss at 3 a.m. in the morning, and Bukowski floats dead, upside-down in a pound, pockets full of rejects, head still crackling racket of complaining womanhood or ladies from Mass who think I don’t rhyme with reason. Anyhow, it will be an apartment house. everything passes. m.m. had all that leg and ass and killed herself. we are confused. we don’t stick together. Hemingway shotgun. Chatterton rat poison. Pascal’s last bath. we all of us ache and are incomplete forever. no victory. another night’s sleep, if you can sleep. sometimes I don’t sleep for 2 or 3 or 4 days or nights, or so it seems. madness? why not? what man is holy enough to last? the stupid are the survivors. they’ve got good lasting qualities. I must be stupid. I never thought I’d almost live to see 45. god it’s gross. I walk around an old man and I still feel the way I felt when I was 11 or 12 or 14—that is—sick, unpleasant, not knowing; aching from the sight of wooden faces, wooden jaws, wooden arms, wooden eyes, wooden blood, wooden voices. jesus mother am I the only one stuck in this fright of un-wonder?

  I watch this guy playing with his machine from the window. I would say he is dead but the woman would object on grounds of my inhumanity. He’s young, has too much hair under a dirty felt hat, and no ass at all, the pants fall flat, a straight line down from the neck to the heels, a line like a hard board. He scratches at mud on his machine. He has a little rag and a scraper and he works at the mud. he picks away. inside of his head it is like inside the head of a blackbird skipping over a wet lawn. tick, tick, and that’s it. I am supposed to save this man for democracy. I’m supposed to say something, nice about him. I can’t.

  stomach in bad shape. I should gaze upon more pleasant subjects. then too, I don’t look so good either. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  [February 23, 1965]

  [* * *] I now stoke up me cigar and plus with the coffee comes ye steam of bullshit, so gear your readies, pat yr paddy belly, wipe the come off yr nuts, & hearken baby like a white horse in moonlight listening for the last rider slipping up thru the elms.—I don’t know much about the phoney-non-phoney theory of lit., but it might be best to keep the ear down to the heart, not like Emily Post, but more like the assassin or the garage mechanic with Saturday night off, but I don’t know if talking about the stuff helps too much. think maybe the easy way is best: I mean let it slip out like a wet fish outa your drunken hands; and, of course, if the fish intends on staying, you got a stink, you don’t have much chance. Planning seldom gets it, although the way you lift your coffee cup or brand a steer or dip the thing into the cobwebbed dauber, might. Speaking of writing (aren’t we?) I get much more stuff back than I ever get rid of, which keeps me kind of puritan about how much moxie I do or am supposed to have.

  yes, I’ve heard about C. from other sources; evidently he runs up the gall mast of most. I guess he makes too much money for most, and the other things too, yet I can’t get flamed-up. I too like to sit around in safety and I drink endless cans and bottles of beer and smoke cigars until I am senseless and ultra senseless and I go on go on within the seeming peace of rented walls, o lifting and drinking rivers of that yellow piss and pissing it out and listening not to jazz like a good human but to the symphony, the large orange flaming red green white fires of curling steam steel leafy hammer sound sound and form, and men centuries old walk around inside of me, and I feel them feeling it, saying it as if they were sitting across the table from me, lifting a beercan and saying, “Bukowski, it’s hot shit. everything’s shit shit, yet look maybe—I don’t know. I may not make it. have you ever seen a yellow dog pissing in the yellow sun? Bukowski, rip me open another beer!” I can come crashing in from the racetrack where maybe I have nipped away at a half pint or pint of scotch during the action, but this liquor hardly contains anything except maybe a bridge to walk across so I can get over and past the 50,000 faces whirling dead en masse like other things—like flies, like rocks, like turds. it gets me over.—now I used to hang in the bars, peering through the smoke, lipping the bartenders, walking out into the alley (usually for a beating), fumbling at the whores, and often ending rolled or in jail. after some many many years of this, Mozart or Bobby Strauss or Stravinsky does not seem too bad over a familiar tablecloth and a couple of salt and pepper shakers and a calendar of a peaceful cat. yet, I still gang outside now and then, and there’s trouble trouble, and the last time I woke up in a jail with piped-in music, and a kid with a broken arm on the floor next to me. When the last I remember was being in a fancy apartment and lifting some girl’s dress up to her waist and kissing her legs. Somewhere along the line madness enters and the police enter, and it’s the same old thing. or it’s getting home, and hemorrhage again, very close to death again. Some blood and then lying still as a rock, listening hoping for the mending of the threads not quite ready to go. someday they won’t mend; meanwhile I am writing this letter to you.

  I’ve got to smile. you’re a real romantic, looking for me in that index file in the library in Elgin. Let’s see? where would I come in? just before Bunin, Ivan, The Gentleman from San Francisco? no? well. or Bulosan, Carlos? America is in the Heart.

  America is in the balls. America is in the factories. America is in the streets, hustling shines and newspapers, climbing down through skylights t
o the mother-blossom of the safes. I am the toilet paper wiped against America.

  waiting on birth always wants to make me cry, it’s so sad, like the gliders coming across the hill and ripping through the strings of gas-inflated balloons fingering the freak sky. farfetched? yes, that’s what I mean. maybe by now it’s all over, and over into the good. [* * *]

  Jeffers, of course, laid it down in blocks of cement and he did not lie, and he lived it too. I guess we owe the curse of Carmel’s artist colony to him, I just as we owe the curse of Taos to Lawrence. The freaks and the ants and the pretenders always love to swallow the shadows of the great dead, walk their gardens, stare at their ground, but it does not work—it makes them less instead of more. There are no crutches. nothing is free. I will never forget the finks in the Village cafes with their berets and goats and sandals and happy and ugly faces. I got out, fast.—I’ve got to go out and pay some god damn bills before they shut things off, rip things out. It’s a small court in front with highrise apartments rising, rising on either side, walls of swimming pool darkness and $125 apts. with wall to wall fucking, and we linger out in the grass, remembering the sun, and to the north is Sunset Blvd. (the cheaper section) and the observatory on the brownpurple mountain, and the radio is off, and the blue Cad. drives off with its dead man, and an old woman with a red coat walks by. the girl-child is asleep on the big bed in the bedroom. Marina Louise Bukowski. what awaits this little wench? poverty? a father of 60, drunk with dim eyes when she is 15? or a photo of a man who died in 1966? no, it’s one day at a time, and my life too and her life too and all our lives, Van Gogh hanging from the walls like a necktie, Brahms’ skull 5 feet under rattling and rolling to the fucking of 2 gophers.

  all right then, I now give you the gift of a little

  s i l e n c e

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  February 28, 1965

  [* * *] in 4 or 5 days I climb on the train to New Orleans so if you do not hear from me I am not necessarily dead, although maybe so. Not having mail forwarded. Going to read it all when I come back and see who wants my sweet balls in the frying pan, or better yet—enshrined in crusted gold. Brought in 5 horses first yesterday and still only made $7, 5 or 6 drinks, and then I loaded on the high-weight even-money favorite in the handicap (#131), one of the worst bets in the the business. There went my profits. well, that’s past; let’s only hope I have learned something. at 45, they are beginning to walk around and shut out the lights. get going, Buk, the grave diggers are licking their palms in the sunset!

  Purdy makes it with the typer and with grants and talking at the universities and by, he tells me, the grace of his wife. so being caught up in these various segments and his homemade wine, you’ve got to forgive him, he’s a little lost out there. Layton I don’t know much about, except he must teach somewhere and probably is getting a little comfortable and have heard in Lit. Times fashion, that he believes anything written by Layton is automatically good. This is bad. men change. everything changes. you don’t have to be much to realize that. we all write very badly at times and sometimes we write good, which doesn’t matter too much either, like a good drunk or a day off when the old woman isn’t acting haywire like some Bette Davis throwing a pissfit or the kid wailing wailing the blues, scratching your inner guts with barbwire, and you wonder what ever happened to that small room when you were alone and glad to be alone forever. yet, we go on: having lost the left jab, the hook, we backtrack, stalling, clowning, smirking…trying to save one round, sneak in the sleeper punch. sure. sure. could I be an evangelist? sure, for myself [* * * ]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  [February-March 1965]

  [* * *] Sheri’s pissed at me because I stay down in the mud and also because I put her in a poem now and then. But take the Cantos. I understand they are good writing because Pound wrote them. I know there’s a lot of Chinese in there, Cantonese, whatever. Sheri tells me they put him in a wooden cage once and did all sorts of crude things to him. All right. he went to the losing side. Many men are tortured every day. they put tarpaper on church roofs. they dig up beets. they pick lettuce. steal cars. slaughter beef. turn the same screw. wait on old ladies. on and on. they cut us all to pieces. well, anyhow, I took the Cantos home. Every time I went to the library I took out a copy of the Cantos It was always there. 15 times I took the Cantos home. 15 times I took the Cantos back, unread. I don’t say it is not a good book; I say it is not a good book for me, Ezra Pound and Sheri Martinelli be damned, and all the Sitwells too, and H.D. and all that gang.

  I told Corrington to stay away from the novel but he had to run off to Oxford or someplace and become a Dr. and then come back and write a Civil War novel—and the next one will follow course: modern & incest & rape & murder, which happens, but not like turning the same screw happens and putting down the newspaper and looking up and seeing the face of the woman across from you as a dead woman. they write about the seeming-loud things and leave out what is happening to us, to people like you and I, me, and so it’s published. they only used to write about kings, people of seeming nobility, mostly, and in a sense, this still holds. I remember once sending a very long story, almost a novel, to a magazine, and it was about an alcoholic who ended up strapped down to a hospital bed, and who heaved up his blood and guts and was left to die in the dark charity ward. They wrote back, “This is a tour-de-force, powerfully done, but we finally decided to reject it because the central character seemed to have no meaning or worth.” The central character was me. But what man has no meaning or worth? Almost all of them, and none of them. Anyway, the story was finally lost in the mails, or really I couldn’t get it back and I didn’t have carbons and so to hell with it. But nobility? nobility is useless and beautiful. didn’t Cervantes tell us that? the toilet is universal. who knows about the boss finger-fucking the secretary in the stock room and then firing the shipping clerk for taking a 15 minute coffee break? who knows how the streets of Bensenville look at 6:15 a.m. in early March? who knows about Blazek and Want-ling cutting through a golf course?

  yet, I doubt any of us have been broken enough to see. I used to mouth how I used to lay around alleys drunk, but this was nothing, merely a time of easy thinking about sunlight and dirt and country and shoes and flies and warts and flowers. have you ever read the novels of Knut Hamsun? he had to live most of it, and smell it, and take the blade. he could write with feeling for the fool. too many writers dismiss the fool. Hemingway had style and Hemingway had clarity, and wrote more badly as he went on because he leaned on the style which he stole partly from Gertrude and partly from Sherwood Anderson and which came partly from his soul. style is a good tool to tell what you have to say but when you no longer have anything to say, style is a limp cock before the wondrous cunt of the universe. Hamsun never ran out of things to say because Hamsun (evidently) never stopped living. Hemingway stopped, or lived in the same way. Sherwood Anderson never stopped living. and then there are always little men in back rooms, like me, talking about their betters, saying what’s right and what’s wrong with them. there have always been and always be little men in back rooms: ask Malcolm X, ask Kennedy, ask Christ. [* * *]

  * * *

  Both sides of the correspondence with Al Purdy, the Canadian poet, have been published their entirety in The Bukowski/Purdy Letters. The relationship began in 1964 with a favorable review by Purdy of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands and with Bukowski’s enthusiastic response to Purdy’s own work. This next letter was written during Bukowski’s visit to the Webbs.

  [To Al Purdy]

  New Orleans

  March 14, 1965

  This won’t be much of a letter. Sick, sick, sitting here shaking & frightened & cowardly & depressed. I have hurt almost everybody’s feelings. I am not a very good drunk. And it’s the same when I awaken here as anywhere. I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken—but there’s always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during t
he night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any. The finger used to belong to my father, or to some shack-job, and now it’s an editor’s finger. But it’s the same. For Christ’s sake, Al, I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  March 24, 1965

  [* * *] they continue to build highrise apts. all around here, and little men with hammers and steel helmets crawl around fuck around, talk baseball and sex in the smokey sunlight and I stare out the window at them like a demented man, watching their movements, wandering about them as the kid screams behind me and the old woman asks me, “Have you seen my comb?” “No, I haven’t seen your comb,” I tell her as a man walks by the window and his face contains the monsterism and brutality and sleepiness and false braveness of a million faces of a million million faces and I want to cry too like the kid but all I think is,—I’m outa beer and I’m broke and the world is burning shit and the flowers are ashamed. something like that. not all like that. just mostly the first part, and the rest crawling in my brain like some beetle. [* * *]