[To Douglas Blazek]
March 25? 26? 1965
[* * *] I had a few bad days in N.O. but after 2 weeks we had each adjusted to various madnesses and ignored each other enough to be comfortable. I signed 3,000 pages plus, which was painful, yes. The Outsider has not expired and will come out with #4 shortly after Crucifix which is finished now and has to be collated and so forth, a big job, slow, but you should have your book soon. They are going to another town. where, I don’t know. [* * *]
no, I don’t sleep either. I used to shack with a broad who claimed I never slept. she also claimed I jacked-off in the bathroom which I didn’t because the explosion of her body across my sight was all I needed to leap and drive home. she drank too much, she drank more than I did, and you know that’s too much. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
[?early April 1965]
[* * *] I remember getting ten page letters from my old man while I was starving in cardboard shacks trying to write the GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORY and when I first got the letter I’d always flip through the pages and riffle them and search them but nothing green nothing green and I’d be freezing my whole soul in a pitch of vomit darkness and he’d write ten fucking vindictive pages about AMERICA and MAKING GOOD, and it was worse than silence because he was rubbing it in—he had a place to shit, beans, turkey, a warm bed, a lawn to mow, names of neighbors, a seeming place to go each morning
and he rubbed it in good. and here I am an old fuck myself, probably on a ten pager telling you how I feel and what I mean to myself. anyhow, a little green, I wish I had put more on that 17 to one shot this afternoon but I didn’t, and so a $5 for dogfood and for which I expect a lifetime subscription to Ole if it ever manages to continue??
I remember one time I was on a suicide kick and drinking myself sick hoping I wouldn’t do it somehow, or however a man thinks at such time. all nerves shot. all everything deepening. the human face and way a horror forever. crouched under my blankets like a worm and wishing I could be. anything but what was attached to me. grisly factotum of high-steeped blues. God damn God’s breath and understanding. I wrote a letter with some English prof’s name to it and I verily had at one time almost sensed an understanding. he had written me how some kid had hit him over the head with a brick when he was young and how he understood violence and horror. I was staring pretty much at pretty knife blades way up high in a 3rd. floor place, esp. when the stomach got sick and the blood came and I had to lay low for a couple of hours because I wanted to kill myself my own way, or maybe as a voice from the back would say (I hate voices from the back!) maybe I didn’t want to die. anyhow, I wrote him the circumstances of my soul and also my penury (which was secondary) and what happened? this reader of all philosophers, this understander, this guy who got hit by a brick, this teacher of children, this man who drove into a place with his car marked out for FACULTY PARKING…what happened???
he didn’t answer. for 5 months.
you’ve got to hand it to me, baby, at least I answered, dig it anyway you want, sometimes even sound helps, it would have helped me when sunshine looked like shit and still often does, but you gift me with letters of genius, open and swimming blood real, no writer that I know of has ever written letters such as you do and I am keeping them and if grace and God and luck be kind some other eye and eyes will fall upon them beside mine.
YOU TELL YOUR WIFE AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR DOGS AND YOUR LANDLORD AND YOUR GROCER AND YOUR ARCHANGEL AND YOUR FUCK-ANGEL AND YOUR UNION MAN TO BE VERY KIND TO YOU CONTINUALLY for you have a touch of grace and damnation and beauty that the world should try to preserve.
and yes all I can say is “hold, hold.” please try to understand what this means.
…might amuse you…the prof who didn’t write. I met him in New Orleans one night at Webb’s place. he still wouldn’t speak to me. he talked to everybody else. so what? who wants to talk?
…McNamara? seems a little standard…yet seems lifted by something. I can’t ignore his wanting to be real…whatever that means. christ, how phoney we sound, I sound! well, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have
FACULTY PARKING
ONLY
I hope you remain alive in order to keep sending me the good letters—your letters mean more to me than any poetry I have ever read because your plain and even and screaming and clear voice talking certainly beats T. S. Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, John Fante, even Jeffers…for me. how do you do it? how many poems DO YOU WASTE by wasting letters on me??
god damn you, then.
look, you asked some puzzling and rather melodramatic and taboo really questions on writing and witchcraft of poetry, for each man is some kind of weird nut, brotherly as a hatchet, and he’d rather keep his balls to himself than spread the flesh for hungry chipmunks of whore shit flaking through clouds of radium. all right, eyow, ok, well, I need some teeth pulled anyhow.—
to wit: “do you ever get the lousy feeling of where the hell the next poem is coming from—that perhaps you can’t see anything worth writing about anymore?”
Answer: no.
“What kind of stage or period or interim do you think yr in?”
I don’t know. I am afraid of thinking. I have seen what thinking does to men. I watch my girl-child look at an orange in the sunlight and know that she is all right. I look at our President Johnson who tries so hard to think, so hard to be right, a leader, and I know that through trying that he is a madman. I forgive him. but, like you: who feeds the dogs?
yet, like Hon. Johnson I think I am getting better, I think I am doing better…I THINK. I THINK.
I think I can be another Cervantes
another Warren Spahn
Jersey Joe
Braddock
Laxative Lazarus shit shouting
lazarus…
but don’t make me write a novel now
or ever
unless I g.d. truly feel like
it—and
not just for a space on the
shelf.
so the way I feel now I guess I won’t ever write one, I am terribly lazy and more terribly tired
I need rest to gather
and they keep the sandpaper on me.
lack of guts?
of course.
[* * *]
—please, you don’t bother me talking suicide. suicide is a rat running thru my hair continually. in fact, it’s the only way I can get out of my present position. these 2 small rooms. no money. all the time I am writing to you I am holding a conversation with a woman scraping a dish, and if only she were washing the dishes, all right, but she’s just fucking around and nothing gets done, all is dead, and the girl-child is a foot to my left and every now and then I reach out she reaches out, we make faces, and I love it, she’s round flesh of young madness, but really I am stuck in this center, and the very beginning was an act of kindness, something I did not want, and now more kindness kindness and there is a love for both of them, a mad gambling sort of thing, but they are killing me, not the poetry in me, fuck that, but me, and they don’t know it
and this is the worst:
to be eaten up
day by day
piece by piece and you are the only one
who knows
while they play jokes with
celery sticks
and a good night’s sleep for
them.
I don’t think I sleep more than one or 2 hours a night. I know that there are many nights that I never sleep at all, many many nights.
and it is not that I am having profound thots
I am not having any thots at
all.
just looking at the shades
this wall
a drape
a side of a dresser
the invasion of ants
the wind like a mother’s voice dead
to a sissy like me,
covers shaped like
matzos
the holy ghos
t of
Pain
I can’t sleep
I used to live with an old whore with
a very wisdom sort of
wisdom and she’d always say
“You tell me to shut my mouth so
you can get some sleep;
well, let me tell ya, bastard,
I KNOW YOU:
YOU NEVER SLEEP!!
so don’t tell me ta shut up!”
[* * * ]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
[April, 1965]
[* * *] oh yes, well, on slipsheets and all the stuff, I don’t care; I rather like the paper you use. F. likes to act intelligent and knowing, only she’s really all fallen apart, and it’s kind of an act and she runs with these poets who have workshop meetings and read their stuff to each other and chatter, and they go to things like “pot-luck” dinners and long church drools on Sundays and they meet for coffee and cake at Fay’s or Marty’s and they may even have a martini and they all STINK, and sometimes they come here and sit around and I try to be decent but they chat like monkeys fingering their crotches and I find it less and less easy to be graceful because they eat up my one or 2 hours of peace that each day away from the mill allows me before I go in again that night or on a day off they might stay for hours, and so at times I have gotten a little hard, they will be sitting yammering in the small front room and they will see this figure in his shorts, cock peeking out, pounding in beerswill rhythm on the hall boards making for the kitchen, saying nothing, ignoring all, not worried about Selma, not worried about Viet Nam, just trying to shake people and ideas from the ratskull and suck down another beer and maybe think about blasting out for a fifth of CUTTY. They may be fucking F. physically as well. I don’t care too much. We are not married. the kid came along and I did the thing, moved her in. I think the kid is mine. I thought she was too old, I thought I was too old. the gods fooled me and reamed it home. one more hotpoker for good old Bukowski! Anyway, don’t worry about postcards from F. she’s that way.
I would be honored if you pumped out a book of selected B. bullshit letters. I don’t know if the people kept the letters or if they were assholes. Must rush off to work, so must shorten bullshit and just pump out names, say in order of the people I have written the most letter to. [* * *]
* * *
Tom McNamara, editor of Down Here, responding to the Ole essay, wrote to Bukowski from Greenwich Village.
[To Tom McNamara]
April 9, 1965
yeah, sweetheart, life is a spider, we can only dance in the web so long, the thing is gonna get us, you know that. I am pretty well hooked-in now, have fallen into some traps. and speak mostly from the bent bone, the flogged spirit. I’ve had some wild and horrible years & electric & lucky years, and if I sit and stare out the window now at the rain, I allow myself the final gift of some temporary easiness before they throw the dirt on. Yet, even being trapped I know I am trapped and that there’s a difference between oranges and rocks. there’s a difference between hard retreat and puling surrender. O, I save what I can; I never give anything away—I mean to the shits and chopppers & the clock & the buildings and the mad masters, the cock-sucking bloodsuckers. yet it’s like one man fighting an army without help; yet when they tape me to the wall I will spit in their eyes; when they cut my balls off I will drip blood on their shoes…so forth, on and on, endlessly….
the small pamphlets and books of my poems are out of print. You might find a copy of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands in the New York public library. I know there was one in the New Orleans library when I was down there. And I like an old man watching a kid run through a broke field I could not help being somewhat proud that the fucking card showed that the book had been in and out, in and out, continually, almost never resting on the shelf. Maybe N.Y. doesn’t have a copy. I haven’t checked L.A. This book is my selected poems from 1955 to 1963. I began writing poetry at age 35.
I was down in New Orleans last month helping Jon Webb put together 3,000 copies of Crucifix in a Deathhand. Yeah, I helped him a lot; I helped him get drunk. Anyhow, the book will be distributed by Lyle-Stuart Inc., New York, I don’t know exactly when. Contains all newly written poems, none of which were submitted to the magazines. Why don’t you write Jon Webb, 1109 Rue Royal, New Orleans, 16, Louisiana, and ask him how to get holda a Crucifix? Book about finished. Large, wild, and beautiful format, cover and paintings by Noel Rockmore.
I lived in the Village some time back. was disgusted. no men burning in agony, dreaming knives. just con-babies. berets, goats, sipping tea by the window, or whatever they were sipping, I never went in. they looked too comfortable, they looked too money, too phoney, sure. sitting there with their cunt pretending they were Picasso. don’t ever pretend. be McNamara without the band. there I go, handing advice like God. an old fuck on a rainy day lighting up a Parliament and dreaming about the slow and easy fifth of CUTTY I am going to drink this Sunday while my mind draws designs on the pavements and the butts of all the beautiful women who don’t even know that I am alive. yet, there aren’t many beautiful women. sows. lots of pavement, tho. look, I’ve got to go out into the night. hope I’ve answered some questions.
* * *
[To Ann Menebroker]
April 10, 1965
F. and M.L. have been out of town for 2 weeks and must suppose F. will get to your letter with response after she settles down to the sanctified break of living with me, ya.
Crucifix being collated now, but no price set, and this type of thing done by Lyle-Stuart who will distribute. I hope he doesn’t get hooked for the 3,000 copies—I can’t buy them. art work by Noel Rockmore, vast cover and 4 plates inside. Large book, like children’s fairy tale thing, long wide pages, 100, I am lucky again to fall down into the center of this thing.
meanwhile there is toothache, insomnia, hangover; my wildly staring eye thru the slow drowning. Have been reading That Summer in Paris which somebody mailed me. waste. unless you wonder what Hemingway did in the bathroom of his soul.
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
April 12, 1965
[* * *] anyhow, Sheri M. [* * *] gets pissed whenever she believes I mention her in a poem. she says I talk out of school or something like that. One of her boys came down from Frisco and knocked on my door and came in and said they were going to sue because I had used his lady in one of my poems. I was in there with my whore and I was laying drunk on the floor, and I said, ok, if you’re going to sue that’s the way it works, only I don’t have any money, I don’t even have a jockstrap. then I turned on a tape I had made while drunk and I layed on the floor listening to my quips and madness and singing, and soon he gave up and went away. I even offered to get him drunk but he wouldn’t drink. I guess Sheri thot him a pretty boy; she drew pictures of him all over her magazines, adding curls to his head. But act. he only had regular features; satisfied & blank look; no coal burning. dead, really dead, pal. Anyhow, Sheri I think was for a while sending my letters to somebody at Yale who was sticking them into a tube that was going to be buried—Pearson, I think his name was—and so there go those letters—buried along with a lot of other modern contrivance. Anyhow, Sheri said her Chinaman husband enjoyed my letters. that’s something. S. always trying to get me to change my style to the all-embracing, classical style—the only way to be immortal and so forth. She sent books by H.D. and even had me write H.D. while she (H.D.) was dying. Well, that’s all right. But there are enough of them writing the way Sheri wants me to write. I’ve got to go my way. If I can’t reach the gods at least I can see the dirt under my toenails and dream of sleeping with 14 year old girls. Jesus, save me. But not right away.
[* * *]
* * *
[To Tom McNamara]
April 16, 1965
Typewriter shot thru 20 times and now dead. Must get another: feel like a man without a cock having a spiritual hard-on and nothing to ram it home with. I can’t spin anything without the keys, the keys ha
ve a way of cutting out the fat and retaining the easiness.
If you want to run the letter fine but forget essay a while. A man can go drunk on essays & handing out advice & being a master critic (T. S. Eliot, so forth). I’ve got to go easy because I still don’t know where I am. Guy hit me for a 20 less than an hour ago telling me his word was his bond. If I had back all the money I’ve loaned I could buy ½ dozen typewriters (new) today instead of writing with this fig leaf stem & liquid shoe polish.
You speak of certain names, and I guess we all like the lions who cut the way, yet I met a friend (backer) of one of these lions last year, and I’d rather be a dead cat than feed from certain hands. He told dull jokes all night, drank my beer and argued with his wife. then he tried to slip me a ten. “I’d like you to meet X.” “No, thanks,” I told him, “I’ve read his books.” Then his wife at the door (to me): “You’re so quiet. You never say anything.”
Hell no, they didn’t give me a chance.
Reminds me of when I was in New Orleans last month and 2 college profs drove some miles in to see me and then argued with each other into the night about their degrees and how they were going to take over the university magazine. Finally one of them noticed me, turned to me and said, “My balls hurt!” I told him that was too bad and then they went on with their talk.
Screams From the Balcony Page 15
