Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  April 6, 1966

  you are like me, baby, the life and the way is killing you—it may come out in the chest or the asshole or the belly…something HOLLERS…Krist, I’d like to say the SOUL hollers?? ah ah, we are DeMop in the rowboat, orange huge muscles and mind and siff of the soul and nothing to cure it. ouch! you and I have seen enough factories and hunkies and beasts and straw bosses and layoffs and breadlines and unemployment lines and hangovers and hospitals and jails and rotten women to make anybody’s stomach want to drop out and crawl off into a hairless hole to hide forever until the bomb until the whiskey god of love and easiness (DEATH) shows up. those chest pains of yours are from ugly work and nerves and senselessness; you have 2 clock hands drilling into your heart, and it’s an ugly clock too, very. you need time more than the first 5,000 people you pass on the street and you know it. I do too. don’t kid yourself—many people want SLAVERY, a job, 2 jobs, anything to keep them running in the cage. and when they call overtime night after night, sucking the last blood from our limp bravery, see them smile, smile their greasy overtime smiles, they love it. my god, they have a phrase for it down where I sometimes work. a word. “PORKCHOPS!” they say and lick their greasy lips when the word roars down at us, as God shits on us from the speakers above that are turned as LOUD as the machinery allows: “YOU ARE REQUIRED,” says God, “TO WORK ONE HOUR OVERTIME!” that’s the new word: required. then you make that hour and then God screams down, with just 2 minutes to go, that you are REQUIRED to work another. then, the same plan: another, another, until you get your lousy 12. all right, 12 and 8 hours for sleep, that’s 20. hour lunch, that’s 21. breakfast, dinner, travel, shit, shave, dress, undress, say something to your kid, look at the wall a minute, and all the odd things, haircut, buy shoes, get a tooth pulled, try to get the car started, kill a fly…that’s 24, and you’re back. more PORKCHOPS. you know all this. I thought I’d let you know that I know it too. and there’s never any money. for it all, there’s never any money. you have as much money working 40 hours a week as you do 72 or 32. strange, but it’s true. you have a family, I have child support. we do not beg off. it is something we did and we run it through. I love my little girl ten thousand times 402. fine. all right. but we’re crazy too. we’d like to walk down some beach with a knapsack and a cheap bottle of wine. we’d like to stare at the moon for 3 hours or just sit there and smell the stink of dead fish, of another death; we’d like to sit there and mug and tickle the shadow of China there across the waves, VVVASSSSH!! we’d like to do nothing for HOURS HOURS HOURS, gentle do-nothingness. filling like a sink with hot water. feeling our cotton brains up there. feeling mice between our ears. even wondering about Christ, wondering if there were 13 at the table, wondering if it ever happened, wondering if anybody spilled wine on their sleeve or farted. wondering all the easy things. comparing the sun to a lemon. falling in love with the color yellow like a big-assed whore. yellow, yellow, that’s me, and it’s my favorite color too. good. luckily I knew a lot of the traps from watching my father, from studying my father. I worked myself a lot of lay-around time in. I always lived with old drunken women, very OLD women because I didn’t want children, I didn’t want the trap. “Bukowski,” the few guys I knew used to say, “you can do better than THAT!” “sshish!” I’d tell them, “she’s coming in with the wine.” I even used to amuse myelf when I’d introduce my women. “Hey, this is Mary.” “Mary, this is Joe.” and I’d glim Joe’s face as he took in the sagging bellied, wine-struck, age-struck Bukowski cow. I never alibied. actually most of my cows were pretty good women. I mean, all they wanted was me and something to drink. I figured that these were pretty endearing qualities. meanwhile, no babies, no marriage, no squeeze, and I didn’t look so good either and I didn’t feel so good either and I either felt equal to or inferior to many of my cows. sure, some of them were vicious sluts, dirty and hardened as 3 week old and unwashed dishtowels and so was I, straight, I felt too like cursing all the walls and landlords and fuzz and children and the stars and the queers and the money-grabbers and the stink of life. it was a good bargain: I knew where I belonged, I was clever. I slipped once, and out of compassion more than anything, found myself with a 23 year old wife. she neither had the bone, the wisdom, the chapters of life behind her. she was a snit, a snob…hypersensitive to the smallest criticism, but meanwhile taken in by the grand phonies, the liars, the movie-trained Romantics, the dead-souled pretenders of Grace. fine. but ridiculous. lucky for me, there was a miscarriage. that rather did it. her phonies moved in and told her what a beast I was, or rather, by pretending no-beast they showed the beast in me. which was there. which was truly there. of course. shit. so divorce. escape. I walked down to the beach and tried to read Faulkner again. I layed on the sand with all my clothes on in mid day so they couldn’t see my scars. I’ve got these bloody hideous scars all over my back from some former hideous disease. show me something and I’ll catch it. why I never got the siff or the gon, I’ll never know. only the crabs. and I’ve screwed the filthiest lousiest stuff in bars from Coast to Coast. deliberately. did I tell you the time I picked up this young whore, around 19, 20 in this bar, a real fine piece as the boys would say, only the madam, some old hag around 55, insisted on coming along to see that I didn’t spoil or mutilate her young fine meat income. o.k., I said. we sat up at my place and had a few drinks, more than a few, it was an old place up the hill by the Grand Central Market. I still thought I was a writer or something and was living on potatoes and boiled fishheads. everything went all right until I had another drink or so and then decided it was time for the great lover, Rupert Brooke Bukowski, to screw to fuck. by training and instinct, of course, I grabbed for the 55 year old hag instead of that fine 19 year old meat. training runs deep, pal. I’ll always remember this hag with a face like a killer (I don’t know if they wore a Green Beret) and she had one hand missing at the wrist and attached was an iron hand, very shiny and large and silver, with, I remember, one VERY LARGE HOOK protruding. and I mean protruding, baby! after the first grab at the hag, I think she was a lez to top it all, she backed off and swung the hook—S W I S H!—“hey, this son of a bitch is NUTS!” she hollered. and I remember that hook swinging again and again and myself ducking, ducking around the room. meanwhile, the 19 year old meat very puzzled. me too. I ran out of the room and left them in there with my immortal short stories, to burn them if they wanted to, to fuck each other if they wanted to…. where was I? yeah? down at the beach reading Faulkner. trying him again. trying to convince myself that he wasn’t a phoney to me. he’d won all the prizes. his photo even looked like a man. what was wrong? I felt like he was slipping me the smooth bologna. I am still puzzled. he can’t write. he slicks it. he’s celluloid. clever. cute. what’s wrong with me? some monkeys were playing with a beachball and they’d bounce it near me, sand all over Faulkner, all over me, in my mouth, ears. I stayed on there, right in the middle of their game, right in the middle of Faulkner’s game as my x-wife ran off with a cultured Turk with a purple stickpin and a cultured accent, a kind of Boyer, and he knew how, he owned a drive-in movie.

  what am I talking about? mainly my extreme cleverness at staying out of the traps. so here I meet this woman. she is 42. I am 44. who needs to worry about children? responsibility? another good deal. by God, when Bukowski came along he must been in front of the line to get all those brains!

  listen, Blaz, the day she told me she was pregnant, that moment, I do wish somebody could have photographed my face. it must have been a monument of disbelief, something say like a guy getting up in the morning and noticing that sometime while he slept somebody had clipped his balls off—I mean, that FIRST KNOWING, that FIRST LOOK, reaching down with the hand and finding nothing there. listen, kid, I have my balls, so far. even tho I wrote a poem about a guy who cut his off. I am just trying to give you the feeling, the look of it. 44 years of planned and deliberate cleverness. shot. bang. like that. over. I wish you c
ould have had a photo of my face then because whenever you got the blues you could take this photo out and laugh for hours, you know.—anyhow, she’s a beautiful little girl, a miracle, and glad she’s here now, but jesus sweetheart, god or somebody pulled the switch on me, fast. well. think of all the young bodies I bypassed! arrrg! when bigger and better jackasses are born, Bukowski will still lead the parade. [* * *]

  glad to hear Assholes will be a book. I dedicated the thing to Want-ling not on the assumption of a book but merely to dedicate. last I heard he was working in a carwash for $ 1.25 an hour. this is kind of rough on near-genius. I don’t mean that they should be spoon-fed and elevated a la Patchen, no matter what the misery. all men suffer, even those who don’t write poetry, and if we’re going to help Patchen with a bad back, we also gotta help Joe Brown with a bad back, or else this makes Patchen no good, you see? think you do. [* * *]

  Webb, I dunno. he’s blown thousands of dollars running around the country for a year looking for a new Taos, a new Carmel, a new something, meanwhile staying out of direct Atomic Warfare areas, according to the experts. well, that’s his business. but he’s running around in special trains with his wife, 2 dogs, the printing press, tons of cartons of paper, type, books, manuscripts. they had to get away from New Orleans, couldn’t stand it—tourists, the Ku Klux Klan, thugs, bad weather for Lou’s lungs. o.k. I get postcards from this city, then that: “I believe this is it. everything fine.” then a week later, another card: “oh, we can’t stand it here!” and there goes the press and the dogs and the works somewhere else. Laredo, Santa Fe, Phoenix, Cleveland, Phoenix again. “I feel El Paso will be the place. I can get paper. can walk across the border to whorehouses. real life. everything I need.” no, something went wrong in El Paso. too low? Santa Fe was too high, and other things. one place they rented a house (Phoenix), paid 2 months rent, $200. fine place, they wrote, plenty of room for dogs. then I hear it is too hot. air conditioners don’t work or the blowers don’t reach the crapper or something. 3 or 4 days. on the train again. the press, the dogs, the works. 200 dollar rent lost, but o.k. they learned something. Phoenix won’t do. where now? now it’s Tucson. $235 to get the press hooked up again. triple wiring like in all the other places. Tucson, o.k. have made down payment on a house. fine, low monthly payments. everything fine. fixing place up. there’s even a bed for you. dogs love it. will have bookshop in front. send all your old books, paperbacks, little magazines. (I did.) well, fine I thought, they’ve settled. they went through the same thing a year ago, and finally came back to New Orleans. now, at least, they know New Orleans is not right for them. Los Angeles is in the Atomic area, Frisco is in the Atomic area, so forth. I had written them a long letter some time back trying to tell them that there weren’t any cities, that shit spread wherever humanity lived. but they didn’t seem to get the message, so when I got their notes from various cities, that “this might be it,” I just wrote back fine, fine, good. now I just got a letter from Tucson, “Lou misses New Orleans, wishes we were back. this is a lousy town. the busses stop running at 6 p.m. nothing but old, old people around, walking around. we haven’t made any friends.” But they are going to stay, Jon says now, a year anyhow. a lot of work to do. the record Bukowski TALKING won’t be out in April. Chi. Lit Times ad only pulled in about 20 sales so far. they just don’t have the kind of $$$ to put it out now. October better. would take $600 at least to press the record. broke. might do the Henry Miller book submission first, that would give them enough money to get into #5, the Patchen issue, and then, in October, the record. I busted my ass, shooting mouth into a borrowed tape recorder, laying on the floor first on one side then the other because my ass was too sore to sit on, I got them fresh mad tapes for their April deadline, and now I find I had until October, maybe forever. it’s Webb’s $$$ and his right to travel but when he cries Wolf now, when he cries broke now, I really just do wonder who is crazy, me or him or the dogs or the press or the American cities and The Bomb or what? he gave me 2 great books, Crucifix and It Catches, I can’t deny that. yet I wonder sometimes if I wouldn’t have been better off coming out in cheap editions of one or 2 hundred copies? certainly the writing could have been judged as writing. it’s difficult to hold down pages like that. I means Crux and Catches. automatically they are going to beanball you for coming out in a purple necktie. format, beautiful format! all right, fuck it, I wrote some poems one time, long ago, too. see the ungrateful wretch I am! [* * *]

  * * *

  Larsen’s book is The Popular Mechanics Book of Poetry, published by Blazek’s Mimeo Press in 1966.

  [To Steven Richmond]

  April 12, 1966

  [* * *] got to agree with you on the Larsen book. humor is good when it stems from truth—in fact, truth alone is often humorous in itself, makes me laugh. but the humor of artifice—whose worst device is exaggeration—always makes me a little ill because it is just another con game. confined, my last days in the hospital, with some idiot with a t.v. set he never shut off, I was laid open to what the world considered comedy and at the expense of my dwindling sanity. how they made me ill with their obvious extremisms—lying there with my ass torn open, my beautiful walls taken from me. I suppose that the worst is Bob Hope with his flip little cute exaggerations. and his name droppings. I don’t keep much up with the world and he drops these names I never heard of, all supposing to mean something. about the only lout I could stand was Jackie Gleason—at his best he showed some showmanship, at his worst he was like the rest. but Larsen, Larsen, no.

  * * *

  Bukowski wrote a foreword to Richmond’s book, Hitler Painted Roses (Santa Monica, 1966).

  [To Steven Richmond]

  April 15, 1966

  hang in there on Hitler, the more they holler the more you’ll know you are getting closer to the bone. I remember when I was a kid, 16, 17, I was just beginning to play with short stories. came home one night and here were all my clothes thrown out on the front lawn—coats, shirts, shorts, stockings and short stories. the old man had dipped into a drawer, uninvited, and had become a literary critic. “No son of mine is going to write stories LIKE THAT and live in MY HOUSE!” “Come on out here,” I told him, “and I’ll beat the shit out of you.”

  be glad Hitler curls their neckbones. you are there. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To William Want-ling]

  April 18, 1966

  [* * *] dull letter. sorry. but have been writing a lot of poems, even a review of Artaud for local liberal rag. the libs too are a kind of jellyfish crowd. I want to see the poor man fed, sure. but don’t make me love him. anyway, surprised they took the Artaud, I hung some strong salty lines in there, using the review as a crutch to slip across some of my own demented and boiling ideas. [* * *]

  * * *

  [Addressee Unknown]

  Mid-April 1966

  Randy, old kid,—

  Frances and I separated now. turning your letter over to her. she is good at writing long (long) equivocal things. you’ll probably get a 6 pager full of…wisdom.

  I keep writing my poems and waiting, mainly, to die.

  Sorry I am a little short of tonality and space here. All I can hand you is a brick. Love works like machinegun fire. I don’t trust it.

  You are a good young kid but you will be broken like the rest of them. Your first mistake was not to take the 5 years rap. It would not have killed you, not nearly as much as the 30 days you are doing now. But that’s the way it works. It’s very tricky. we are finally tricked out of the last of our wits. so be it. so says this drunken voice from the top of a syphilitic mountain.