Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  Really, tho, I guess the gods let me off easy. My balls didn’t hurt once all night.

  Then, you speak of my having starved. Of course, you know that starving doesn’t create Art. It creates many things but mainly it creates TIME, and I don’t mean the paper bit. If you’re good and you have time you have a chance, and if you’re good and you don’t have time you won’t be good very long. I think there is kind of an area of distillation you have to go thru and once this settles there isn’t much they can do with you, although you can do it to yourself (see Hemingway, S. Anderson and so on…). [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  April 17, 1965

  [* * *] the old typewriter finally fell apart to unrepairable stage. like the death of an old friend, all the fire we went thru, the drunks, the whores, the rejects, and the occasional home run. I have not learned how to handle this typer yet—it is a very cheap second hand and I see why now—you’ve got to hit the keys just right or it won’t work. I hope you can read the enclosed manuscript. [* * *]

  I get these letters on the essay I wrote for Ole #2 and they seem to think I said something; I am a fucking oracle (oriol?) for the LOST or something, is what they tell me. that’s nice. but I AM THE LOST.

  going on to the collection of letters you were talking about; some of them may be thrown away and some of the people might be pissed at me, and some of them may be too possessive, but I think most of them pretty good people and you ought to get some co-operation. sure, edit wherever you wish, edit out dull parts, print partials or what you think entertaining. no, I needn’t see what you’re going to print beforehand. that’s waste. I am not ashamed of anything I have written in letters. you print what you want and how you want. and I look forward to this bit and hope you can work it out. you see, I wonder what I said too. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  April 21 or 22, [1965]

  have not heard from you on first part of Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, but here is second part which I wrote tonight. naturally, I hope it goes. please let me know soon.

  tired now. got your letter today which I will get to soon; I mean, answer soon. feel slugged now, and am closing.

  * * *

  [To Tom McNamara]

  April 24, 1965

  Letters? god damn, man, let’s be careful. all right at outset, esp. for tightheads who have been working in sonnet form, writing critical articles, so forth; it gives them (letters) the facility and excuse for wallowing in the easiness of their farts and yawns without pressure. really, writing letters are easy: nobody likes form, and I know this—that’s why I discard a lot of it in my poetry (or, I think I do) (form is a paycheck for learning to turn the same screw that has held things together). so now we start with the letter as an o.k. thing, and then the next thing you know instead of being an o.k. thing, a natural form, it simply becomes another form for the expulsion of the creative, artistic, fucked-up Ego, like maybe this letter is, I don’t deny it, I don’t deny being a part of the poison, and soon a lot of the boys end up working as hard or harder on the letters than they do on their poems. wherever the payoff lies, what?

  now look, for laughs and for instance, I’ve heard a certain old-timer who’s never quite made it with his work but who has always had a finger up some big boy’s crotch or been in some Movement. maybe I’m being unkind. anyhow he has seemed monied and has seemed able to recognize a talent before the big publishers puke over it and kill it with circulation, publicity and $$$. what I mean is, I now hear this man is going to issue a collection of his LETTERS. now, how in the hell are you going to issue a collection of your own letters unless you keep carbons? and if you keep carbons, aren’t you more or less writing a literary essay type of precious thing, and keeping a hunk of it yourself because it’s so good? or if you don’t do that then it’s: “Dear Paul: I hope you have kept all the letters I’ve written you over the past fifteen years as I am now issuing a collection of my collected letters and, of course, would like to include mine to you…. hope you still have them, and, of course I would o.k. any deletions you would care to make…”

  I used to think of a letter as something like this: “Dear Paul: Sure hot today and have drank a lot of beer. Martha had a wisdom tooth pulled yesterday. The Dodgers lost yesterday. they just can’t get their pitchers any runs…”

  yet I find most literary letters duller than this, and this includes the letters of D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Wolfe, or any I can remember, and, if I have missed some good ones somewhere, let me know.

  I had to pick up a cheap 2nd hand portable and as you can see I have trouble controlling it but as long as some of it can be made out, all right. and I sure hope it hits through o.k. to this nice fresh carbon I have stuck underneath.

  yes, the LSD is the fading rage, stuff written under LSD, about LSD, my god they all do the same thing at the same time—THE IMPROPER PROPER THING, if you know what I mean, and always in the concert of the safety of each other…. sure, if you want to use parts of my letters, go ahead, why the hell do you think I write them?

  somebody in the neighborhood here has his stereo turned up as loud as possible and I do believe because he is enjoying it he also presumes everybody else is enjoying it. it is really only a half-hearted masturbation of music and it does make me ill. I’m not saying I’m a sensitive type but I keep thinking of the continuous intrusions that keep slapping against us and it is these intrusions: the small and continuous and everyday ones that finally grind us down either into acceptance or insanity. intrusions are many and varied, like say a dead face, urinal murdered face, hanging onto a living body and looking down into a bag of apples the hand fills in a supermarket as you walk past.

  there’s hardly any way out, even after you’ve seen enough, and after a number of years you have seen enough, but you can only close a door and pull the blinds for so long before they come get you: the landlord, your wife, the public health inspector, the men from the insane asylum.

  now toothache, tooth breaking off in back, I have about 7 stubs of teeth that need yanking but I am a coward and no money and ashamed of the condition I have allowed my jaws to crash to. I think of the dead down there in their caskets or what’s left of their caskets. how are the teeth of the dead? think of all those jaws down there! think of Shakespeare gaping open, unable to drink a beer.

  maybe it’s because it’s so hot today I do not feel well or maybe it’s because I have to go to WORK and it’s Saturday and I’d rather get drunk, but they tell me I’ve missed too many days already, and my girl-child has these blue eyes and she thinks I can make it, but some day I’m going to lay it down again and see what happens, watch the walls come down like bombardment, watch the landlord snarl, listen to the lady from relief insult me, roll my own cigarettes, put ice in the cheap wine to kill the gaseous taste…the defense and demise of myself comes above all—my choice to fall and not do, stare at ceilings, beg for bread, exist like a pigeon, a sack of manure, a flower under the window with 17 days to live.

  I see the flies in the green leaves and I think,

  it’s strange, they’ve never read Richard Aldington…

  * * *

  “Nash,” mentioned in the next letter, was Jay Nash, who, Bukowski notes, “ran the underground newssheet, The Chicago Literary Times.” He had published Bukowski’s Run With the Hunted in his Midwest Poetry Chapbooks series in 1962. Bukowski notes that he was “obsessed with Hemingway and the twenties.”

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  [late April 1965]

  [* * *] I don’t see how Ole gets around so much. I hear on the phone. 2 guys knocked on the door and brought me beer. all the same thing: “I read your article in Ole.”

  on Confessions, of course, I’m glad you accept. actually it’s going to destroy a lot of IMAGE that has been built up and it’s going to make me freer to move around. yes, I know that any section could be extended, and there were more acts to add, I think of them now
: the gang of fascists who carried guns, screamed heil Hitler!, drank wine; hanging posters in New York subways; coconut man in a cake factory; the colored maid with big legs who fucked me in a St. Louis hotel; a Fort Worth redhead; myself insane in Dallas and more more more, the things that happen to almost everybody while they are waiting for the executioner.

  but look, on doing the novel sort of thing something holds me back. maybe it hasn’t jelled, maybe it seems like work, maybe dropping poems off the tips of my elbows is easier. technical point—in Confessions I have a place in the slaughter house scene—I think I say something like, “The Negroes rolled up the wheelbarrows, they were painted a white, a kind of chicken-shit white” or some such line. I remember thinking of correcting it but forgot. I mean the people might think the Negroes were painted a chicken-shit white. should read something like: “The Negroes rolled up the wheelbarrows. the barrows were painted a—” or let it go the original way. who cares? [* * * ]

  word from Nash who also sent a flask Hemingway took a slug from, and now it’s mine, a nice gift, and it will see use, good use, and Nash also says that he is going to bring out Cold Dogs by the end of this month—which to me, means in a couple of months. This is in response to a ten page drunken letter I printed out via hand to him. at least it did appear to rattle buried bones, finally. Crucifix now (see Webb and Lyle-Stuart) is being collated and it won’t be long at all, and someday too I will get Confessions, and hang it up there on the top row of ye old bookcase with the rest. I don’t feel so much like a writer as I do like somebody who has slipped one past, and I guess my detractors would agree with this. I feel like Warren Spahn squeezing out just one more for the lousy Mets, or like the dice are hot but it’s gotta end. of course it will. I’ll peel and die like old paint, hurrah, but anyhow I have been gifted with not ever having had any first-class fame, and this has allowed me to go on writing the way I please to write. I’ve been lucky, no one can have been any luckier. look, I’ll be 45 in August, think of it. no guns have killed me and I have not been suckered into any beliefs. uh, just think of standing in a kitchen and pulling up a shade with 45 years on you and letting in the sunlight, thinking of the stockpile crashed behind you, thinking, I might even some day be 65, peering from slits of eyes like a grey tank and pulling at a tiny bottle of whiskey and lighting a WINSTON and watching the blue smoke curl curl climb the air, and still feeling bad, and taking it, wearing an old green sweater with moth holes and knowing death is very close as the young girls sing in the streets and literary and political giants have risen and exploded and disappeared.

  the Vietnam thing is in the papers every night and the govt. keeps sending over more planes, bombs, troops, battleships, and, of course, I don’t understand it, I haven’t understood any of the wars, I only know that I am always told the enemy is a big bad guy and unless we show him constant muscle and boldness I am told, he’ll someday be in the doorway finger-fucking our wives, but all that I do know is that after the clearing of one war we immed. pump up another, and after you see the same picture book again and again you know that it’s only a nightmare train always getting ready to run off the tracks, and you neither fight it, accept it or forget it; you ride along hoping the thing holds to the rails a little longer, hoping for one more beer in a peeling kitchen while listening to Haydn, hoping the enemy has sense and forbearance instead of what we’re told he has, and the newsboys hawk the crazy news as our wives burn the toast, think of other things like changing diapers and nose drops, of going to a Sunday’s church or wanting a drive down the coast to inhale the turd-filled ocean. but the car’s too old and the spirit’s tired: forget it, baby, I want to sit in here and just drink tonight. what again? again. Blazek’s wife brings him beer. why don’t you bring me beer? no, I don’t want a boiled egg. listen, what do you think of this Vietnam thing?

  Lewis Mumford said long ago that there wouldn’t be any atomic war. that we would only live under the shadow of fear for some decades, perhaps for the rest of the century.

  how in the hell can Lewis Mumford say that? how does he know? as long as there isn’t an atomic war he sounds right. when one happens nobody will care whether he is right or not. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Tom McNamara]

  May sicks, 1965

  writers are a sick-head lot, a gathering of neon-light tasters, spitting out their words, their absurdities, their bile, their orange-juice blood. we are down in submarines; we don’t know; a nervous nasty lot…

  I’d rather sleep for 3 or 4 days than do anything, so what happens? I can’t sleep at all. I worry about motor tuneups and the death of sparrows. and all the women walking around and me not fucking them. then, sometimes I think I am too much topsoil, I want to get under, forget the toteboard and gambol with the worms (later, I know), so the other night I am wandering around at 4 in the morning and I pick up something by a Chinaman, 300 or 200 B.C., a couple of centuries after Confucius, and here’s this guy running around giving the word to Dukes and State Ministers and Kings, but it doesn’t reach me, I don’t have any armies or loyal subjects or disloyal subjects, only a matter of keeping myself alive another 15 or 20 years if I feel like it. more wasted time. now I’ve got a pain under the collarbone; I’ve been going a pack and a half but my pecker is hard when I awaken the few times I’ve slept. I am angry with white Spanish walls and sound of tires on the pavement. no, I don’t read much anymore—Donleavy, anybody. it’s a matter of the juices saying no, no, no. no. there’s simply no intake. if I power it down against the grain I am deader than I am now and that wd. be some horrible thing, ah.

  I hear Lyle Stuart is going to charge $7.50 for Crucifix in a Deathhand, my new book of poems. It has expensive paper, format, plates of artwork and so on, but I can’t see anybody paying $7.50 for a book of poems, and he has 3,000 books of poems, and so I guess he’s going to have to stack them wall to wall and forget it. most of the people, I think, who might go my poems, most of them don’t even have $7.50 and if they did they’d prob. buy something to drink. well, I write the stuff and what they do with it is theirs. the paper is supposed to last 800 years or 1800 years I forget which and I don’t know, except one bomb or bad poetry will take care of all that.

  Your New Bohemia sounds a little disturbing, and it might well disturb the shopkeepers of the Village if the tourists get the buzz. I remember when I was in the Village so long long ago, 25 years ago?, I happened to read in the paper that O. Henry hung out in this certain place and did his writing on the table down there. so I went on in, down the steps and looked around. red tables. nobody there. I thought, O. Henry must have been a fool. I walked up to the bar and ordered a drink and the bartender said, “Sorry, sir, I can’t serve you.” I didn’t ask him why. I was sober. but it made me feel filth as if he smelled some inner stink in me, and I had been feeling mad, thinking suicide, maybe I looked too ugly, too vile. anyhow, I did not like the place, drink or no drink. then down in New Orleans a month or so ago I am walking along with the editor and he takes me through this kind of sidewalk cafe place and he said Hemingway and Faulkner and Tennessee Williams used to hang out here at one time or another. a real commercial hole it was, and I thought, these guys must have been crazy. jammed with tourists and conceited waiters. I told the editor that those writers must have been nuts. and he said, well, they were drunk.

  that still didn’t help too much.

  there’s a lot I don’t understand but this is standard. when I wipe my ass I guess I understand that this is something that should be done. and I understand that I should not go out on the streets naked there might be lions out there. Vietnam, hitler, caesar, the falling of boards from roofs I do not understand.

  do you know something? I am getting sleepy. maybe I ought to go to sleep?

  there are days of too much of the same and in the whole human mass not an eye or a face or a voice or a sound. Only a frog under a bush. only a cat crossing a street. a street without tits. graveyards. books on mathematics. chalk for lunch. madhous
es. farmers. fish. meatballs. manure. sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep.

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  May 20, 1965

  [* * *] the woman is standing here beating a big spoon around inside of a water jug, now she’s ripping cardboard, banging refrigerator, sniffling, snuffling, now she’s making coffee, now the kid suddenly screams, more bangs, these walls are so close, refrigerator again, now she lifts a wet rag and carries it across the room like a sleepwalker…they are pouring it to me BLAZ!!!

  30 minutes to go before work and I am trying to get this letter off to you

  DO YOU WANT ANOTHER COOKIE? I hear her voice say.

  fuck it. we march on. an angel will give me a hand-job in the year 1986. it doesn’t matter. [* * *]

  little incident last night, foreman saw me standing talking to another man. this is against the rules. he rushed up. we have little slips we carry that show the amount of work we have done. he rushed up and I jammed the slips into his belly.

  I’m leaving, I told him.

  what?

  I’m sick.

  huh?

  I’m sick of working.

  what do you mean?

  my 8 hours are up.

  I saw you standing there talking…

  my 8 are up.

  why didn’t you tell me?

  add me up.

  then the jackass runs to another minor wheel and says, I saw Bukowski standing there and talking to that man…

  well, says the other guy, his 8 hours are up.