Screams From the Balcony
Page 31
got caught in a dentist’s chair the other day, even tho I have no money and not too much courage. a French wench wiggling all over, with rich blue eyes like out of a paint tube came in and started cleaning my teeth, god I was ashamed, I am such a mess, but she leaned her flank upon me and scraped away, leaning there, talking to me, warm as bacon she was, great Jesus what joy, my gums bled and she said, “I’m sorry,” and I said, “it’s not your fault, angel.” and she leaned the flank again and went into my ugly old mouth with her pick, and it was love again, the first time I have loved a women since 1952. I don’t mean sex. Carl, I mean that kind of high-washed feeling where you float, where you can feel the love swarming out of you like a blue and white fountain of miracle. but I will never tell her, she will never know, for she already knows. she has been in America 7 years but she has not yet drowned. who in the hell expects to find these things in a dentist’s chair. when that bastard comes in with his hairy arms and his pliers, then we’ll have the moment of truth, eh?
[* * *] it is only when the Artist is dead that the masses enjoy his suffering and go to warm movies and eat popcorn and enjoy it. I was guilty of it myself. I remember when I was in the Village I went to see a movie about the life of Verdi. if I remember, there was a part there where he got a bag of nuts from an old woman in the street. he was starving. I like that. I have starved many times trying to cut some insignia into the cement. I shouldn’t have liked it, the Verdi thing. but then when he came back famous with the beautiful woman at his side and he gave the old woman a batch of money for the bag of nuts that night, I didn’t care for that too much. he was defaming her act, showing off to his broad. he should have taken the old woman to his place and fucked her and drank wine with her and asked her to talk to him across the kitchen table. but then Verdi was not perfect. I make some mistakes myself.
so I light another cigarette. have another beer. hold off the studying of the streets of los angeles that hangs over me like a mother ax. if I had any guts I would sit and write and paint for hours, for days, for months until I starved to death or until they came and got me. but I know that that is what would happen, one of those 2. I’ve been through it before. sometimes the police come or sometimes the landlady tell you you’ll have to go. drinking, typing, painting, sleeping, that won’t do. a man should leave at 7 in the morning and should come back at 7 at night, finished. church on Sunday. a hand-job in the bathroom. no women unless you are married. this country is so soulless; no wonder they can’t whip a handful of starving midget men and women and children in Vietnam. it’s not Russian or Chinese aid that’s holding it back. it’s damn fool American fat boys who have lived like idiots, well-fed soulless idiots in and since the cradle. no wonder they torture the enemy; deep-in, somewhere, they know that they are lost, and inflicting atrocities upon a living and real people is their only way of getting back—like tearing flowers, burning butterflies, fucking and hating everything in sight. I have never quite heard of such a war; surely we have degenerated back to ages darker than the Dark Ages????
Omar the Tentmaker would have a lot to say about this.
too many people clear their consciousness with a hot fuck, but after the sperm is wiped away the world is more there than ever before.
how ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm?
now playing some Armenian or Turkish music on radio, from the Fez. a little cafe-like place down next to the Racing Form building. I went there one night, quite drunk really, they didn’t want to let me in at first, but I was in one of my warm and gentle moods and they relented. I sat on a big pillow on the floor and some big warm wench kept bringing me all kinds of strange drinks but none of them knocked me out like continuous American whiskey would have and I felt warmer and warmer. there was plenty of alcohol in the drinks, I could taste it, the expert, but it only kept me CLEAR. people, men and women came around and sat on pillows and talked to me. I didn’t want any ass. I just wanted to feel the people. and it was marvelous. and all the time, this strange music. I just kept laughing and enjoying, all sophistication all ego gone, burned-out. I don’t think any man really wants to be a prick, really wants to hate, it is only pressures that make him hate. of course, I don’t care for this THOU MUST LOVE, either. I don’t like love as a command, as a search. it must come to you, like a hungry cat at the door. what? hearing this music reminds me of that good night. I am not always as hard as my poems. [***]
* * *
[To Ann Menebroker]
November 23, 1966
good on your acceptances, no surprise to me, you seem to be gaining on yourself, damn good sign; me, I’m showing slippage but little I can do…[***]
Xmas season is when the populace really becomes beastly. they cram and run and flurry wild and mama empty-eyed; me, me, I got! we got! my family! safe! goods! roof! food! a drink in hand! whoopee!—what sickening stuff. it’s pressure and haste, a MUST. nothing easy or good about it.
then…HAPPY NEW YEAR. ugggg. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
December 11, 1966
[* * *] somebody got me started on a novel and then got pissed at me because I tapped a rich friend of his for $150. I got drunk and had to get my car started, the old ’57 was murdering me sitting at that curbing not moving, not moving, and also had to have 6 teeth pulled. how can we write novels with the extra poison from our teeth adding to the other poison? so now I gotta finish the novel, but not in too bad shape because I’ve heard from 2 outfits (small presses) that want to do a book of mine, and they seem trustworthy, but problem is they might have been thinking poem-book. this novel about 2 years I once lived in a faded green hotel, The Way the Dead Love. I guess I’ll finish it. I screwed very nearly every woman in that hotel including the scrubwoman who was nearly 60. even screwed a guy in the ass by mistake one night. it ought to be a laugher. starvation, drink, madness and fuck. really all tragic and beautiful people including myself. the chapters will be short clipped action happenings, but no general plot, just a recording of the place. done like Confessions only much longer. I hope it doesn’t pancake. I’ll lose about 100 poems writing it. but shit, I’ve lost 100 poems, at least, in the mails. that fucker who lives with Warhol, I forget his name, won’t return a batch, and in a recent issue of Tish I fuck recognized he stole one of my lines, used it as a last line to nail down a lousy poem: MY FEET TOUCH CHINA IN THE DREAM. those are my lines, babe. although accredited to…Malanga. giz christ, gossip. but true. and discouraging when weighed against my hopes for the human factor ever becoming clean.
they are going to play me a little Bruckner later my radio tells me, so I will feel better. you know that you are one of the few people I can talk straight to without worry that you might not catch on, or that you might be hurt. these are hard to find. sometimes I write a drunk letter to an editor after poems are accepted and the poems come back. this is kind of funny to me. somewhere in the letter I cross one of their precious gravy paths and they know that I am their enemy. in fact, I even throw in a few short chops to test them. these returns are mostly from people who only print “name” writers. usually on expensive letter press. some of the poems they print are very good—not Ginsberg’s or Duncan’s or Bly’s or Kelly’s but say Paul Blackburn, so in a sense I lose something by flapping my drunken lip, but I do find the letter-form to be a very good exercise for limp-soul when the walls are running with blood (mine). you, I don’t worry about. I kiss your ass not, BUT WHEN I CAN NO LONGER TELL A GOOD MAN HE IS GOOD AND IT MAKES A CERTAIN JOY RUN UP MY ARMS, WHEN I CAN NO LONGER DO THIS I WILL CASH IT IN. fuck you.
Bruckner. then there’s Wagner without the words. and Mahler. there is the warm soup agony speaking, the wallpaper, the rooms, the roaches, the pimple moon. there are people with feet and hands and heads. it is all very something. I am not an Art or a music nut. I do not ream myself with sounds night and day over a fancy stereo that all the neighbors must hear too. but sometimes when I am very low low low and quiet shot, the job crashed throug
h me like I am a tunnel, all their talk for hours: baseball, pro football, sex lies. the constant needle the American worker gives to the other American worker through shame and boredom and madness, and I have the best needle in the place—they do not call me HANK THE BARBER for nothing. “that son of a bitch has a line for everything.” I even harass the supervisors to keep them off me so I can loaf more. I spend more time in the crapper than the janitor who cleans the place out. but I’ve had over 100 jobs from Miami to Frisco and I know how it works: I am only trying to save my life and they are only trying to kill me. my talent, if I have any, is the fight for the last inch which I will not give them. they’ve cut off my hands and arms and one ball and they face me with an m.g. but as the guy reloads his belt I spit in his eye. bravo. fuck the snob publications who only think that poetry talks about life. and I’m going to make the same fight with my poetry no matter if the mailbox comes all over the rented porch with rejects. Schumann’s good too, you oughta listen to Schumann, just once. once. trust me. you’ll know. you are probably a jazz cat. well, that’s all right. I like that too when it seeps into my proper vein. but the dark long stuff hits the core. I don’t trust Beethoven. he catches the ear with surface crash, and outside of the First Symphony, seldom a bad line. but I like more madness. I keep feeling like he’s skimming on a giant mirror. yeah, I know he had his troubles. and I also know that if I had discovered him instead of the world discovering him I would like him better. shit perversity. jealousy? I do not know. I do not know my soul or lack of soul. I only know that I must be fair to myself also and that I must allow myself a judgement outside of the standard concepts. I’ve got to be kinder to myself. on the other hand, I only figure Faulkner as the giant fraud of the century. and using words myself, writing myself, I am on surer ground. even as a young man, a very young man, reading him on the beach while the other guys played football, myself being bigger and meaner and lousier than any of them, reading him on the beach there with the dandy sand being kicked in my face, not even knowing that I myself would someday try to write, I lay there, I laid there as I lay dying, and I thought, how can he get AWAY with this stuff? this obvious dull hack-trick shit? ah, babe, I was a very special critic from the moment I slid from the cunt and my father’s face (naturally) was the first face I hated. but not the last.
thanks for the drawing, old boy. it always girds, grieves me a bit that they do not turn you loose all day to play with brushes and words, but like you realize, things that happen in that foundry come out in the paint and in the words, but still, I am not the one to believe in the SUFFERING OF THE ARTIST, or the suffering of anybody. including myself. every time I see a mouse caught in a trap or a photo of a lion shot dead, I am unhappy. unrealistic, they tell me. but to me Realism is only a condescending to the Actual and I believe that man has enough sunlight and god and luck within him to change the actual. when I let the mouse go and the lion eat me, if I am strong enough, perhaps the lion will finally not eat me, perhaps the mouse will sit down and listen to Bruckner with me. madness? shit, maybe. but where has world sanity led us? [* * *] listen, baby, you think my old mind is cracking? I drink drink after drink writing you, knowing that I must face that mob at 3 p.m. tomorrow afternoon. suffering from dizzy spells, weakness, may not make it, may fall to floor as they discuss the afternoon’s pro football game. yet I feel that all I am saying here will not be wasted, you hear it anyhow. I know that you do. I give you lilt and go-on, do I not? and also myself. the strangest thing is, I cannot eliminate D. H. Lawrence from my consciousness, not the sex-appetite thing the public sunk its tooth into, but kind of the washing of feet and skin, the thin pin-point structured line. a very bitter man, somebody once wrote him off as. why not? he didn’t accept the outside Realism, and I don’t either. I go for the bloodflow stuff of the inner color. I remember a half page or so of his stuff about some taxi drivers (I think it was in Australia?) that is perhaps along with Dostoyevsky, some of the best writing I’ve ever seen. well, enough of that. [* * *]
christ, I am out of smokes but still something to DRINK. maybe just one good woman would cure me, licking her tongue around and round and around that thing, my soul stuck out into the air like a telescope. but here I sit, what, in a city of 4 million? hell, I don’t know how many million and I sit alone. I’ve fucked my share but more and more as I grow older I know that I can no longer pay the price. what I mean is, the demeaning of self in order to get in or with. I have these problems. all the women in the world sucking my cock at once could not change what I now feel. which is, that I cannot kid myself into a generative love attitude AT THE EXPENSE OF SOMETHING ELSE. do you read? I am too far gone. I cannot faggot myself for the expense of a come. I refuse to make a million dollars to go to bed with a Veryl. I will stick my cock into the hollow of a tree and let lightning strike me dread dead before I ever funky myself again into that hollow and wonderful malicious hole that demands so much. will you write it off as old age and laugh? I don’t think so. I trust you. I do think that you are the last man in the world that I do trust. don’t die. on me. fucker.
Bruckner quite graciously good, and as I try to type my fingers have more and more trouble hitting keys properly, all right? good. you don’t care? good. high heels going past window. fuck me, fuck me, they say. of course, Freud was wrong, sex is not the whole pie, and I knew this long before the detractors, but sex is part of the pie. exit goading impossibilities with come into cunt of lovely woman who has eyes of purple into her head. I’ve spent many a good night, and some bad ones. I’ve had some terrible fucks where the pussy spread from wall to wall, but even with this kind, a long night of talk and drinking, a warmness.—I’ve learned more from the women of the streets in rotting hotels than I ever have from Kant, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Balzac, Thorstein Veblen, G. B. Shaw, Karl Marx, Hitler. this is not talk shit, this is true.
I owe most of the heart of anything decent in me to the streetwalkers of America.
don’t get me wrong. there are a lot of savages out there. killers. shits. dopes. sub-normals. liars. but I mean you get hold of the one or 2 good women out there and Harvard is toilet paper, Blaz. I’ve been lucky. I only met one but she taught me where my arms were and my mind and my cock and my heart, q.t., wuz. I hope to write a novel about her someday but I don’t think I am man enough to do it yet. I may never be able to do it. if I can live to be 60? I hope to call the book simply Whore. [* * *]
* * *
• 1967 •
[To Douglas Blazek]
January 2, 1967
the f.b.i.? what the hell? they really think we’re porno? lot of other places they should (?) could go. must be something else that is bothering them and they use the porno as a left jab, as an excuse. what might be bothering them is that we are possibly creating life and nothing makes the dead more angry than this. that has to be it, sweetie. but relax, we are as clean as a desert bone. I guess you never thought your little mimeo machine could make J. E. Hoover twitch in his sleep. secretly you ought to be proud. of course, wives never understand such a thing—they feel it threatens their security, I mean the everyday things: supper, laundry, t.v., the funnies, the fuck, the picnic, the drive to Aunt Sarah’s. but I know you can put her straight. [* * *]
* * *
The review mentioned in the next letter of Louis Zukofsky’s A Test of Poetry appeared in Ole no. 7 (May 1967).
[To Douglas Blazek]
January 12, 1967
6 teeth pulled today, so stayed here tonight and wrote the review on Zukofsky. use it if you want to. I am bleeding like a river of shit and I guess I shouldn’t get any beer, will swallow blood, haha, and cold beer will scream the holes in my jaw, old daddy getting there, there are only so many teeth to be pulled then I am FREE. ya. guy going to build me a bridge. will try to hold onto my remaining teeth a while. don’t know how I will pay him but we never discuss this thing. very nice. I think he was drunk, he sang all the time he was working, and one tooth just didn’t want to come out and he screamed STUPID THIN
G, STUPID TOOTH! what’s all this talk about teeth? came out and smashed my tail light against a phone pole. poor old ’57. I told those people I wouldn’t eat any walnuts but maybe if I warm up the beer…??? anyhow, Zukofsky in here, and hope you are making it through the days, you know like killing a bull every ten minutes or being put in a gunnysack with 14 monkeys. how do we last, old man? sometimes I think that we are braver than all the armies of history, and then I know that’s stupid: the armies don’t count, and we hardly do. except to the walls, a couple of faces and our own way of waiting. I am down to 4 codeine but that should get me through the night. knives, pliers, hospitals. watch out for spiders.
P.S. no arrival of F.B.I. rather disappointed.
* * *
[To Ann Menebroker]
January 19, 1967
[* * *] have been down, the old depressive hackdown, plus sickness, mine, Marina’s and so forth, meanwhile working the hateful job, old stuff, but time all sliced to small sections of stumbling into a room and turning on a light and falling down. meanwhile there are a half dozen poems I wrote while drunk that I haven’t yet lifted up off of paper. I mean, all I have to do is type them up but I can’t get to that. no tragedy but a buzz in the dome. and down at work a foreman leans behind me and says, “I want more work out of you, Bukowski, I want some production!” and I am dreaming of the lame bones under earth, the whole earth threaded with the bones of the dead—what a halloween. and then my little girl gets her foot caught in the rear spokes of a bicycle that her mother rides her around in in a little box in back, and I told the woman much earlier, “I hate the god damned bike, it stinks of tragedy I wish you wouldn’t ride her in the thing.” but no, she insists, but when all fucks up she runs to me with the mutilated kid. next it will be the whole stack of them in the middle of the street run over by a Falcon or something. but if you suggest that a woman should not do a certain thing she will insist upon doing it—thinking it proves that she has independence and a soul, but verily all it proves is that she is an asshole. well, let that be. but getting the kid to a doctor did get rid of an almost continuous cold, pen shots and liquid. but like I say.