Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  this is a short letter and I am sorry if you are a girl. wear high heels, etc….

  you know, it is amazing the ugly number of people in the lit. world hate me. no, don’t send me to headshrinker. no complex. thing in present The Smith. AN INTERCEPTED LETTER FROM CHARLES BUK, something like that.* but really the parody does NOT WRITE LIKE I WRITE. impossible. maybe I do write too many letters. maybe I do write too many poems. but it is simply a matter of energizing into the INCOMPLETE ABSOLUTE, you follow? yes, you do. it may be a flowing of shit, and yet within all the turds I feel is some tiny flower. you might have to look pretty hard. I have had a lot of hard days…drunk days, days in jail, days of madness, days without cause or form, and the university boys take heed, they don’t like to hear back alley talk. THE MAN IN THE BACK ALLEY IS SUPPOSED TO DAMN WELL KEEP QUIET! no, I ghostly damn well throw out the mangled butternut skulls of myself, the sucked-out flies, the cardboard faces of Jesus, Saroyan at Malibu, James Dean & Bob Dylan inflated Dylan Thomas inflated, the inflated fucking raft, Bogey the dull picture hero, myself spitting out my teeth and my life without a chance to breathe. they want the straight-lace picture. novels about the Civil War. novels about daring sexuality within the daring and lovely rich. the UNIVERSITY IS THE THUNDERHEAD OF DEFEAT. the young know this. so they get sucked away from this and they get sucked into other cesspools: Bukowski, Thomas, Dylan, Ginsberg—anything except by going into that lonely room and finding out WHO THEY ARE OR WHO THEY ARE NOT. it’s too hard. and milked and slugged and smiled at by parents and grammar schools and high schools, they are already robbed by the time it is ready for them to THINK. think becomes a dirty word. because they have been TAUGHT THAT THEY WERE THINKING ALL ALONG. not so, of course. but if a man can recover, if he has the bounceback, the miracle, he will find that the first 30 years were wasted in fighting off, regrouping before HE CAN BECOME EASY. THINKING OR LIVING IS NOT VERY HARD AT ALL; it is the other thing that they are doing that is killing them. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Steven Richmond]

  February, 1967

  yes, the whores with one or more children will generally treat you more human to begin because their circumstances are more desperate but once they figure they have you hooked in against the pussy, lo, the more than trouble begins. there are about 3 women looming on my horizon, eager-eyed, trying to act like kool-true dolls, but I’ll be damned if I think I am going to play buck-antler deer with a hard for them. I am tired of the whole gory scene and think I will remain a hermit of an old man behind pulled curtains—say, peeking at schoolgirls as they walk by, whistling through my broken teeth, then running for my paper and crayons and drawing the tower of Pisa, or the Eiffel. [* * *]

  —yes, Georgakas strong stuff, not the usual textbook Marxist, neurosis-anarchist, Black Romanticist, bones-of-Trotsky, they-shot-Lorca, let’s listen to a folk song type. he leaps from a kind of hammer forge energy purpose of his own invention, he does not hum the same old shit and is man enough to know where he is and where they are. and not introvert enough to let them overpower him with his own logic. he leaps like a wild and hungry monkey in a cage, but screams a seeming very good sense and livingness. if all his breed had the same living faculty, I’d throw in with them, start by setting Yorty’s hotel on fire and so forth. but I am leery of his club membership, am afraid they are a bunch of hand-stamped farts, and so I sit at the typer, go down to the postoffice, go to the race track and write letters on windy afternoons to Steven Richmond.

  THERE IS ANOTHER HIGHRISE APT. GOING UP DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET. I am now completely surrounded. I see all these beehives. I see people more and more living stacked on top of each other in a kind of demented high-priced luxury that they pay in a kind of fear and a kind of love of the stink of each other behind those shiny walls decorated with mass-produced artwork and sexfilm paint. luckily I can’t afford to die in such voluptuous candyshit; I will end up in a cardboard box in the hills. I have discovered the last green hills in town—it is just before you hit Huntington Drive on the way to Santa Anita, a turn left off of North Main or North Broadway, I don’t know which, anyhow the streets end there, and there it is: these slices of high green hills, tall, and nothing on them, no terrible houses, no terrible people, and I always feel like stopping the 57 and getting out and climbing up there, walking around in it, laying down in the weeds, but no guts, the city has me, the track calls me, but those hills ride inside me as I drive past, and looking at them, it’s like vomiting up a whole sick metropolis and I feel better. there used to be a space like that on the way to Los Alomites but they found it, the developers, and they put their mass-produced houses there and the mass-produced people came running and leaped in and mortgaged their souls to somebody, banks, builders, could make 450 percent profit.

  someday when I get rich on the horses you and I will start a colony. there is still desert land somewhere. we put up these houses, rustics, made entirely of wood and unpainted. houses far apart, lots of sand between them. no police force. people can scream or drink or sing or take dope all night or all day or have lions in their backyards. only no rich, no literary pretenders, no Malibu, no Village, no Carmel. we interview those desiring to live there. “lemmee see your paintings, your poems.” we look. we are snobs. we are pricks. we are selfish because we want to stay alive. “no, no good, you can’t live here.” of course, we take in a lot of stupid women because there aren’t any other kind. then when it all gets too bad, we SELL…for 450 percent profit and LEAVE THEM THERE. (this is the way I talk after 2 good days at the track. last Friday and Saturday; when I lose I am much more humane and carry an etching of Karl Marx in my wallet.) [* * *]

  2 p.m., 2:05 KFAC symphony now coming on, hope they give me something to lean against this highrise across the way…not bad, something offbrand by Haydn, who was a kind of a kool suckass in his time but managed to save some juice. there is much of him that I haven’t heard—the masses, Mass in Time of War, so forth. but prefer Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner without words, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. shit, so what?

  some guy at work met me on front steps, a small hard Negro with little cap pulled down over his ears. “God damn, Hank, you’re really full of BULLSHIT!” “whatcha mean, Roy?” “I saw that magazine.” “what magazine?” “I dunno the name of it, but I saw it. about you being a POET! what a bunch of BULLSHIT! and your photo with the little beard.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Roy.” “no, you KNOWS, you KNOWS WHAT EYE’S TALKING ABOUT, DON’T BULLSHIT ME!” It appears he saw a copy of Dare when he went to his local barbershop. this is the poem I got the $50 for writing. easy money but if it’s going to get these jabberwockies on my back it isn’t worth it.—some guy over other night to interview me for the L. A. Times magazine West. I was very drunk and think I insulted the guy on principle. he wouldn’t even phone me for further details on article but phoned Frances. if this ever comes out in about a month or a month and a half they are really gong to try to rip the meat from me down at the bastille. but I think I can handle them. they don’t call me The Hammer and The Barber for nothing. all else aside, the fact remains that the only battle is to remain as alive as possible and to continue to create the poem or knit stockings or whatever you are doing or have been doing or want to do. anybody can go the way of Dylan Thomas, Ginsberg, Corso, Behan, Leary, Creeley, just sliding down that river of shit. the idea is Creation not Adulation; the idea is a man in a room alone hacking at a stone and not sucking at the tits of the crowd. [* * *]

  Allen DeLoach edited Intrepid magazine from Buffalo, N. Y. Bukowski was a contributor.

  [To Allen DeLoach]

  February, 1967

  [* * *] poetry is survival, sir. it throws some of the stink bombs out of my room. if it comes as rhythm fine or physic, fine, any old way. I think of it more as a loaf of bread, a long fat hot loaf, sliced in half down the middle, spread with pickles, onions, meats, garlic, chilies, old fingernails…add ice beer and a shot of scotch, ram it down under electric light, forget t
he mountains of faces and eyes and wrinkles and bombs and rent and graves, get it in, warm, smelling, filling, light a cigar, blow the whole room paint the whole room blue with smoke, play the radio, think of the bones of Chopin’s left foot—that to me, is poetry, or zingplay, or the rays. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  February 29, 1967 [?]

  [* * *] here I seem to be going through AN INTERVIEW STAGE, kind of a silly treadmill but while going through it I try to talk as straight as possible but I suppose many men going through the same figure they are talking straight too. you never know quite when you’re dying but you can get the feeling of it. I’ve felt quite a few death rays lately. [* * *] I’ll send you copies unless you’d rather not see them; I mean they might make you sick: after all, I am a monster almost of your own creation. the Bukowski Vogue, one of them asked me, it’s the Bukowski Vogue, what do you think of the Bukowski Vogue? I don’t remember what I answered but I do hope my answer took some of the pin curlers out of his hair.

  the idea remains the same. I am attempting to work with the poem; I am attempting to stay alive. I find it easier to work with the poem than to stay alive. all these interviews are beside the point. the typewriter is still there when I run a sheet of paper into it and I sit there and I begin again. there isn’t any background. there isn’t any cheap excuse. [* * *]

  Marina growing growing and we are closer than the grass and the earth. it is a very good feeling, an easy feeling. no trouble, no strain. loose and free; creative without fanciness; real without flags.[* * *]

  the novel The Way the Dead Love has stopped at chapter 5, but no problem. easy to write. about this skid row hotel I lived in for 2 years. it’s just a recording of the people, and all the scenes come to me that I have forgotten, they all come up on the paper as I write. it’s like being reborn, living it again. very strange. have been on gambling horse-binge which has eaten up my time. but no problem. a free day or so and I have 5 or 10 more chapters. chapters very short but filled with the distillation of the action. best this way. less yawns. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Carl Weissner]

  March 24, 1967

  well, shit, a little high, nothing new. well, anyhow, John Thomas said he would airmail tape I did of my poetry—airmail—so you should have it by the time you get this, or very soon. friend, it is almost 2 hours to me reading my swillsteak business. not partkclary from any area, just what my hands reached or what was easy or consumable or felt like it. I didn’t realize that I had read so long but had been drinking a bit and taking down these strange colored pills (not LSD), not really VERY high, only in a passable stage of FITS. I mean, time was a dishpan. it didn’t matter. I read straight through, I believe, without a stop. most of the poems I had forgotten, didn’t know the next line, intonation, connection, but feel really this was for the good rather than the bad because it stopped me FROM SETTING UP ONE LINE TO FIT THE NEXT. this is important, I believe. tho it may not be. I don’t know. I know less and less—and feel much better for it. I think, tho, I am not sure—that the tape is on 4-track. you got a 4 tracker machine? I think this means you play the same reel through twice? anyhow, instructions are on box tape came in? aren’t they? what drab stuff, this talk! only I always get mixed up on presumptions. I don’t want to mix anybody up. I mean, people always presume that YOU KNOW WHAT THEY KNOW. YOU ASK THEM THE WAY TO THE NEAREST WHOREHOUSE. they say, 2 blocks left, one right, see this barbershop, ask for sam, he’ll send you to clean cheap pussy. so what HAPPENS? YOU GET THERE and there are THREE barbershops! and each barber is named SAM. you run back on in and get flogged across the asshole with a rusty windjammer rainbow clamstink frozen loaf of russian rye bread embedded with toy tots singing, “somethin’s happenin’ and you don’t know what it is, do you mista Jones???” [* * *]

  by the way I have an idea of tape mutation intervolving thing but in an rear-area of my own gone gnome tot-process which is: tape mutation or word formage in symphonic or rhythmic breakthru. I have the patterns already processed on paper, the music notes, and hope that I have not [* * *] tipped my beerhand as I would like to try it first, and if I can explain to Thomas’ thick head what I would like to do or change or forward or backward after listening to your Coleridge/Burroughs, Weissner tape, I think I could show you boys where you have missed a lot of chances and natural pluses. I don’t want to hurt you Carl, you’ve done anything but put warts in my bloodstream and I want to thank you for the tape, which was very good in the first interfolding part, but you had too much help somewhere, you were too staid self-conscious arty too Burroughs really. all right, shit, I know he is a genius and I am ejalulative [sic] jealous, fine. what I mean is: both you genuine cats getting up too tight and kind of reading it off of paper, breathing tight, tight kitties, good kitties, but not letting loose with who you are as loaf of bread or something shitting; I don’t MEAN THE ARTISTRY OF WHAT WAS SAID WAS BAD, THAT WAS ART, I mean the Artistry of DOING IT FAILED AS TOO TIGHT AND TOO HOLY. now the Gysin thing at the end was at the other extreme: too highschool and not enough holy Art. if you fuckers could only mix the 2 extremes you’d be in on target, and isn’t that the only place to be? check with Norse on what I am saying. he won’t lie to you even if it means the room rent. he’s too inbred now. there’s no out. ask him. but don’t get pissed if he agrees with me. you won’t. that’s why I write to you. that’s why I write to you straight. even tho we are all more sensitive—no matter how we act—than a female cat’s asshole or pussy or wherever those ramrod hair ends scream into the NIGHT: YOYYOWWW [* * *] my thanks, still, for tape. It was good, don’t let me mix you up. My thanks. But would like to send you my mozart—cadillac intermix soon. don’t be pissed. You won’t be. [* * *]

  oh, christ carl, it’s good friday, my radio keeps playing these Mozart things when he was starving under shit church supported poverty and really throwing curve balls but the church only thot of it as bad music. it’s like Blake, Blake was about as much a religious poet as some whore leaning down to suck purple dick for an extra dollar a mouthful. when the final breakthru is reached we are all writing about the same thing in different tonalities, and you know this, this is no great statement, we are tired of great statements. great statements are made by great liars. Christ had a big mouth and maybe a big ass. who know? if there were more paintings of Christ’s ass (I don’t know of any) than all these of His face, maybe I could go it. YOU SEE, THE FACE HAS LEARNED TO RECHRISTEN ITSELF IN THE FORM, SKIN, FEATURE, OUTLAY AND APPEARANCE NECESSARY FOR IT TO SURVIVE. it is out front. a sign. not hidden, but certainly hazardous. MAN HAS NOT YET FOUND OUT HOW TO MASK HIS ASS. I am not being funny, Carl. what I mean is that I can follow any person a few feet (man or woman) and watch them walk, watch the balancing of the mounds—I know almost everything about them. AND WHEN THEY LEARN TO MASK THE ASS AND THE WALK I WILL GO TO THE LEFT ELBOW. you see? [* * *]

  * * *

  Tompkins Square Press was run by Tom McNamara. The book of letters was not published. The anticipated third visit to the Webbs, now in Tucson, took place at the end of June.

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  April 2, 1967

  [* * *] I have ANOTHER NEW SYSTEM ON HORSES THAT I HAVE FIGURED OUT. this may be it, haha, ha. Frances and Marina gone someplace for a week. I miss M. guess that’s why I got the blues. she lights things up for me and although she has not worked her way into many of my poems, she is still very much there, ya.

  I think Tompkins Square going to do a book of my letters, the drunk ones, I guess. the drunk ones are best. anyway, I got a feeler from them. they say early 68. I’d like to read my damned letters. this is the only way I’ll ever be able to do it. [* * *]

  well, I’ve had 2 wild visits with you—the one in New Orleans and the one in Santa Fe, and if I can work this one out I hope that it goes smoother, to hell with dramatics. but Jon you are a tough guy to get along with, and what makes it worse is that I am a hard-head. I DON’T GET ALONG WITH ANYBODY. if I co
me down I think I will only stay a week, it will be about all I can afford—unless the horses are good to me. this is the weirdest system you ever heard of, yet it works like machinery—on paper. anyhow, if I come down I think it best if you let me look for my own room. I like a place where I can close a door. the New Orleans setup was all right except I was pretty jumpy. sick most of the time, and all those pages to sign. 3100 pages! jesus, you realize what a JOB that was? with silver ink? where’s my boyscout medal? yeah, it’s a shame Stuart doesn’t know how to handle Crucifix. I’m real disappointed in his methods, but he did ship me $200.00 when I needed it bad, so I can’t write that off. god, this time last year I was sitting on my bloody ass, right after the operation, and here we sit around now, all of us, still alive. [* * *]