all right, I’m not much of a man. you’ve busted them out of their high caves with grenades, with air power, and they’ve come out ready to meet their slant-eyed God while screaming a banal language and you got to them, aimed, took them out, got some taken out. people like Mailer and Hem made money (and Hem so me Art, earlier) writing about it, but where does it leave us and what??? [* * *]
listen, Bill, listen to me, stay off the stuff. [* * *] only Ginsberg can smoke pot and advertise it and get away with it because his name has become BIG enough so that he’d love to get busted just to help push the circulation of his fading poetry, and also he’d be able to blow the screws after lights out. a man who WANTS to get busted can’t get busted because the orders are in. it’s like sometimes I’ve wanted to get fired but I couldn’t get fired yet some guy with 6 kids busting his ass and sweating his balls would get layed off. that’s the way it works. [* * *]
* * *
[To Jim Roman]
September 26, 1965
[* * *] A Charles Bukowski checklist/bibliography? why not? for all I’ve written I seem to remain like a monk fornicating a goose in a coal mine. of course, this is to my advantage too. it allows me to go on working, chipping at the block without interruption. of course, I die in my own vomit, but quietly, and that counts. the gods have been good to me, very very good. if you want to know anything, ask me—I have kept every mag that has published me except one—Portfolio II, which went for $10, a Caresse Crosby Black Sun Press thing, very akin to Webbwork, lavish with love and color, I had 2 copies, a short story of mine in there, around 1944, 45?—I remember Caresse writing me—“Who are you to write this story? I have never heard of you.” even a ten buck check, and there I was in with all the famous fucks—Sartre, Lorca, Miller and on and on…I was on the bum and needed the ten. I got drunk. came to the door of my parents weighing 135 pounds. my usual weight around 200. they hated my guts. charged me room and board, atrocious prices, while I got a job and paid it back in. or looked for a job. anyhow the old man stole Portfolio II, both copies, and got himself a better job at the L.A. County Museum by claiming that he was Charles Bukowski, and I often wonder, as the years went on [* * *] what the people thought of him. he was such a beastly stupid prick. “there goes Charles Bukowski,” I can hear them saying. well, that’s all over and he’s dead dead dead, thank god. the date of issues of Story that published my short story was March-April 1944, vol. XXIV, no. 106. I remember I was in New York at the time and walking down the street broke and I looked up and there was the god damned magazine in a rack at a corner drugstore. a hell of a feeling, believe me, when you’re 24 and half mad. a hell of a feeling anytime, I’d imagine. [* * *]
* * *
Blazek planned a book of Bukowski letters but the project never reached completion. Some letters, however, were included in the Bukowski Sampler that he published in 1969.
[To Douglas Blazek]
September 30, 1965
[* * *] I thought you were thinking of a general book of letters but if you want to do an all-bukowski thing, shit, I’d like to see what I have written too. honor, honor, like a crippled cat fighting off a bulldog or police dog while backed to the fence. (this is good scotch). if we should somehow get some fancy publisher and there’s any $$$, I’d suggest we split the god damned loot 3 ways: Blazek, Blatt, Buk. the mighty bees. I don’t look for such luck, however. [* * *]
given a choice, 9 times out of ten a woman would rather sleep with money than talent. given a choice, 7 times out of ten a woman would rather sleep with money than genius. given a choice, ten times out of ten a woman would rather sleep with more money than less money. [* * *]
* * *
Younger readers may need reminding that this letter was written before the widespread availability of the xerographic copying machine.
[SENT TO DOUGLAS BLAZEK]
[ca. September, 1965]
an open letter to those who hold my letters to their bellies in the dark closets their lives…
Dear mr. miss, mrs. queer, lesbian and so forth,
what the hell, they are stacking the stuff up to smear us like fly smear and you hold onto a couple of ten cent baubles. these editors are attempting to collect a collection, that’s profound enough, and a dog with 3 legs staggers. dogs, flies, ach! what I mean is, don’t be that way—when I wrote you to begin with, I wrote you because I thought you were a real person not a real estate salesman of sorts, and look look, I am drinking here now and I think the sky will fall down, I look around in panic, 45 years dripping from my belly and you hold onto a couple of letters. it’s this, it is a collection, and, shit, it may be YOUR LAST CHANCE AT IMMORTALITY, ah haha ha!
when I wrote these letters I wrote them to you and I wasn’t thinking about a collection because as you must know I was mostly very poor and very unknown and still am. yet, some find interest in these drunken wailings. are you going to kill me like being a screw in a jail? are you going to half-kill me like a whore taking my wallet while I sleep? are you going to fire me like the factory foreman because orders have fallen off? are you going to kick me out like the landlord because I can’t pay the rent. WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY IS THIS: ARE YOU GOING TO BE LIKE THE REST OF THE WORLD OR ARE YOU GOING TO BE LIKE THE PERSON I THOUGHT I WAS WRITING TO? if this sounds like I am begging, then I am: I am begging for faith and a little bit to go on with.
I don’t know the actualities. maybe a big name publisher, maybe just shit smeared onto toilet paper with fingernails. but when I wrote you I felt you, the sound and realness of you, the you you you, myself directing the arrow the heart the crooked music of what was left after the factory the racetrack whatever whatever. I can’t feel you’ll let me down; I can’t feel you’ve grown that dead. if it’s only money money, my god, I’ll try to send you a little each day each week each month; whatever I have.
I ask you out of whatever is left of my soul, out of what tiny bit of gentility and mirror of a sweat shot of sun I have left, please send in your letters and you’ll be received where you should be received: where I met you, say, peeling an orange and talking about Picasso, anything, guts, spirals, pawnshop brokers, rain, almost love, broken doors, donkeys without names. I guess I must sound like a cock-sucking preacher. I am tired. I only want all the parts to be all the parts like the river running after the 6 horse. I can’t say anymore. your move and the night grows dank with the sweat of violets pimping.
love, ya ya ya.
* * *
[To William Want-ling]
[Early October 1965]
thanks for the Dos thing, I will comb it like I did the same central caves of the novel, only what bothered me about Brothers [Karamazov] was this unreal division of the brothers into those cast types like chessmen, each with his own move. a wonderful diveboard for stunting but I wonder about the critics who rate the Brothers Dos’s #1 work. Crime seemed the more evil and normal and natural work. I think that Dos wanted to say a lot more than he did in Crime & but lost his guts, his nerve and his senses. a great novel, still. and since I haven’t written a nearby companion piece I had better shut up. [* * *]
it is 5 a.m. as I write this yet the woman snores over and through Mozart. I cannot help thinking that snoring is an infirmity of the soul, a true voice speaking through sleep. my father was the most vile beast I ever met and he snored louder and with more ugliness than anybody I have ever heard. [* * *]
I was never good with the women, never really tried to be, couldn’t get my back up to go through the prelims, the fake talk. it cost me too much. then, too, a kind of withered pride. they all looked kind of pukey to me, even those the boys called “fine.” too much battle. I settled for the old ones. those nobody wanted. a fifth on the dresser, a little talk, a kind of dead fuck (tho, not always), then more drink, more easy talk and then another fuck. but not much strain or pretense. kind of a wearisomeness. I just just can’t pay the price of tight new pussy, and won’t, it’s too high. always was. for me. [* * *] but it’s all shit in pink draw
ers and squatting to piss, finally. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
October 10, 1965
been playing with the little girl for an hour and a half on the rug after work and now I am like a burned city, but, shit, so? & Thursday at 12:30 p.m. I swing onto the CHIEF #20 for Lamay, New Mexico with 2 pints of scotch and then a bus on into Santa Fe, 7 a.m. Friday morning if I do not die or fall off the cliff of myself before then, and I have bummed for years until this crotch of a life grabbed me on this job for 8 years, my god, but a little space again, a shot of light, and then back, or a shot of agony—I do not make it with people, I can’t help it. and I can’t sleep on trains, I can’t even sleep on a bed. the only way to sleep is to drink yourself senseless.
you get people together and they sit around in a room and look at each other and try to think of things to say; it’s ugly and senseless. or somebody gets on the make. or somebody vomits in the back porch. or somebody screws the dog. I am not all there in conversation; sometimes I think I am made of some kind of hard and unfriendly stone. most things disgust me; I don’t know what I want. then I begin thinking that I am insane, that I can’t see what they see, that I can’t understand what they understand; that they are naturally warm and that I am a dribbling fake. and then, in the next flash, I suddenly think that they are damned fools and I don’t give a damn what they think. all my strings fight in discord; my cock is trying to screw my brain, or the other way. then I look down and my belly is flopping out, my sides are flopping out; my zipper is coming undone, China crawls in a teacup like a worm; everybody looks handsome and clean and there is dirt under my fingernails and a stink rises from my soul. a bad fix all the time—perhaps a little exaggerated but not too much.
now the kid is crawling under my feet and the woman says PEEK A BOO! I SEE YOU!!!
no, I don’t want a steady stay in N.M. those things don’t work. the battle I have here now is killing me but that one would kill me faster. I have to go by instinct. actually I am not trying to write mainly poems or a novel. actually poems are only toothpicks that hold me up a little. [* * *]
you might have guessed by now that the literary gang is an unclean mob—dollar crazy as any manufacturer, as any pimp, as any anything. and cold, and cold. they pretend to have intelligence, and they write so seemingly of justice and life, almost as if they knew something. but the dirty cocksuckers would sell you off in a minute; a pawnbroker has more conscience and more heart. the Arts, generally, are the hiding place of the weak and the imbecilic. I know I know I know. I am not knocking Art as a contrivance, as a good bell ringing inside my hollow head; I am knocking the polluted stream, the turds. you know.
yet maybe I am just talking talking talking. the longer I live the less I know. maybe death is just eliminating everything—life is a turd—you pop it out and you are ready. I mean, each day I get a little simpler: I believe less, I feel less, I realize less. I like to watch flies now or look at coffeepots or listen to refrigerator sounds, sounds like god-voices. I hear. isn’t this what a child does? I want it easy; I don’t even want to win. of course, there has been a lot of this, even when I am fighting a man and he is intent upon killing me, I cannot believe him, I cannot believe what is happening and I cannot become truly angry. there are 2 things that bother me, that make me weak in the world:
1: I have never been lonely.
2: I have never been angry.
and the third thing:
I fuck with the Arts.
drinking is only to jell the parts that have been taken apart by factories or whores or a faceful of busses. I mean, that it brings me back to the basics of myself, whatever those basics may be. if drinking destroys the brain, fine. for what my brain has seen it yearns destruction.
god, I wish I had the guts and style and cement and vastness of a Jeffers—clean through rock into an eagle’s eye, and then behind stone, hacking, sounding. I have some of this but not enough, and meanwhile I jump through all sorts of weird hoops at others’ behest, and I get rapped and trapped bit my god by bit until I am hanging by a finger, by a thin gutstring in the middle of an empty sky. get me? melodramatic? o, hell yes—96,000 SEASONS IN HELL ON OVERTIME. [* * *]
and here I go down to poke my smashed head into a doorway. I really don’t want to go. I don’t want to do anything. I lose 3 days at the track, harness races, sunshine, the quiet drink from my flask on the grandstand steps, the looking at the legs of women I don’t know the name of. I could weep for my quiet freedom, yet somebody sends me a railroad ticket and I play it through. maybe it is that I have seen enough hell; maybe it is that I don’t want to see anymore. yet, I guess, there I will be getting on that train 12:30 p.m. thursday, my face twisted into nothing, sitting down, waiting for the thing to roll, wondering what ass I will draw for a seat partner and very glad the 2 pints are in the cloth bag over my head.
wish me luck, baby, wish me everything; I am sad, I got the blues the blues the green blue purple blues. my my my.
* * *
[To Al Purdy]
October 11, 1965
[* * *] people keep sending me poems and novels to read and collections of poesy—I mean people I have never written to or heard of—and all the stuff is bad, bad, bad. I wonder if you realize how much bad stuff is written in all earnestness? and they’ll keep right on with it. thinking that they are undiscovered genius. I rec. a beautifully printed book of poems, fine paper, hardcover, and inscribed “to Buk…” and etc. an honor, sure, but I can’t even write this person and thank him because the poems are so flat and drivelling that they are not even bad—they don’t even exist. if you know the type I mean. yet I don’t throw a book away when it is sent to me in this way and I don’t know what to do with them. I guess there’ll be another one in the mail tomorrow. there are a lot of dead men sitting at typewriters. I would have quit long ago but when I saw the truly bad stuff that was being done, I couldn’t let go. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
October 23, 1965
[* * *] it has been 100 degrees for 3 or 4 days and everybody smells like shit and everybody is, of course. in from track, medium day, plus $32. the human race is an empty egg out there. the crowd is a dog made of sausage. I could not think of fucking or singing out there, or dreaming; only murder.—now back in the trough: cigar, beer, old hat bit. my guts are dropping out and I sit here pecking at the keys like a propped-up Hemingway with matchstick soul. and the typer seems shot. hope you can read.
back from Santa Fe, ya. [* * *] I was sick most of the time I was there but did hunk down quite a bit of beer and scotch and got into a little trouble. Webb always flips a bit when the image does not fit the peg but I can’t be bothered. one night I was quite drunk and locked out in the icy rain and knocking on doors but nobody wanted to let me in. somebody finally relented and gave me a long angry speech. shit on that. my father is dead. I am dead. [* * *] I got on the train and my foot began to swell. I walk around barefoot when drunk and all the glass and steel I had picked up decided to play death. I found a sadist doctor when I got into town and he sliced my heel open and dug and probed and dug. no shot, of course. German accent: “Vell, vell, you took it like a man!” “You enjoyed it more than I did,” I told him. “Nine, nine! you see I vuz only interested in seeing vat was in dere, I did not enjoy…” “make out the bill.” and that, was Santa Fe. [* * *]
Screams From the Balcony Page 23
