The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  “Now, you call it! If you call heads and it comes up heads you fuck Andrea. If you call tails and it comes up heads you fuck Andrea. If you call tails and it comes up tails you fuck Monica. If anything else happens, I’ll fuck you, got it?”

  “This is ridiculous, sir. As a visiting American journalist, I have rights.”

  “In my country, you’re a Dog and dogs have no rights.”

  “That’s right,” said Monica.

  “I refuse.”

  “Where do you want your body shipped, Mr. Brodsky?”

  “My body?”

  “Yes, some address . . . a mother, a father, a wife, some relatives?”

  “You mean?”

  “He means,” said Monica.

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Believe it,” said Caval, “here goes!”

  He flipped the coin high into the air.

  “CALL IT!” screamed Paul Caval, “HEADS OR TAILS!”

  “Tails,” Mark called weakly.

  The coin fell to the floor. Caval bent over it, peering drunkenly. Then he got down on his knees and looked very closely.

  It had landed heads.

  “You lucky dog,” said Paul Caval, “you get to fuck Andrea.”

  Paul Caval got off the floor, went back behind his desk. He liked it behind his desk. Desks were symbols of power. He liked symbols of power. He looked at Mark Brodsky of World View magazine.

  “Well? . . .”

  Mark was still not sure that things were occurring as they were. Then he looked at Caval’s face, at his eyes: the man was insane.

  “I don’t know how to begin, sir. . . .”

  “Just get the fuck going. . . .”

  “You’re not joking, sir? “He’s not,” said Monica.

  “Get on with it,” said Caval, “don’t try my patience. I don’t have much of it.”

  Mark walked over and stood in front of Andrea. It was senseless. She might have been any object, a dishpan, a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer. He didn’t know what to do . . . He touched her arm . . . hard as rock. He looked at her face, it was only a carved photograph of something long ago that had been real. The dead are to be buried, not caressed. He reached down and touched her left leg. It was too hard, ungiving. It was like trying to love death and he had never been suicidal. Everything was hard but. . . .

  He turned away from Andrea and looked at Caval.

  “Sir, this woman is dead, she’s been dead for seven years! I can’t make love to this woman!”

  Caval pulled the luger out of the desk drawer. He pointed it at Brodsky.

  “I told you! You try my patience! Now, get on with it!”

  Mark leaned forward and placed his lips upon Andrea’s lips. The lips were cold. Cold as the dead. He placed his hand upon one of her breasts. It was large, full, well shaped but again like cement. Mark wondered what the other PART would be like. He ran his hand upward, kissed her behind the ear.

  Then he heard the laughter of Paul Caval. Then Caval’s laughter was joined by Monica’s laughter.

  Mark turned and looked at them. Paul Caval was bent over his desk laughing and Monica was laughing so hard she was beginning to cry.

  Mark left off of his love affair and waited upon them.

  Monica stopped laughing first. Then Paul Caval stopped. He sighted Mark.

  “Get out of here, American.”

  Mark walked over to the table where his tape recorder and the tape cassettes were. He opened his briefcase to put the stuff in there.

  “Leave that crap here, Doggie,” said Paul Caval, aka: Mendez.

  “All right,” said Mark.

  “You sure you didn’t get a hard-on?”

  “I’m quite sure,” Mark answered.

  “You can take these,” said Caval, “if you wish. . . .”

  He tossed a two-headed coin, heads upon both sides upon the table, plus a dildo.

  Mark Brodsky left coin and dildo and found himself escorted out of there, through those doors by a very large and impassive guard. The elevator wasn’t far off and as they stood there Mark wasn’t sure but it seemed as if he heard that laughter again, Caval’s quite loud and obtrusive, Monica’s more like a shimmering razor blade against a nightmare mind; his: he had really wanted to fuck Monica.

  The elevator doors swung open.

  Oui, May 1984

  Dildo Man

  don’t get on me about how it came about, I hardly remember, I think he got me into this court, nice place, and he also might have fixed me up with a piece of ass, anyhow, I got to know this fellow, Dave, although I really didn’t like him too much, he was a rather mellow, rested sort, really had very little originality and he dealt a little bit in drugs and he kept opening new Adult Bookstores, I mean, he would run them for a while and then close them down and then he would open another one, and in each place he positioned himself higher and higher on this elevated platform, “I can see ’em all stealing . . .” and he had the cash register high up there and people would have to reach way up and hand him the money and he would reach down with the change if needed, and all around and below the elevated platform were these glass cases full of dildoes, awful looking things . . . and when somebody wanted a dildo, Dave would have to climb down this red ladder full of paste-ups of angels with erections or with wet pussies and he would unlock the glass case and ask, “which one?”

  all of his places were just about the same: a number of dirty mags and books and a couple of machines in back where you slipped in the coins and watched the action. well, I happened to be in Dave’s place one night, the newest place, although I can’t remember what for and Dave said, “you know, I can fix it so you can give a poetry reading here.”

  “here?” I asked.

  “yes, here.”

  “not much room, Dave, I mean all these dildoes and things about. . . .”

  “I can make room, I can swing things around, I can bring in some chairs, get in about 30 or 40 people.”

  “I’ll think about it, Dave.”

  “we’ll split it right down the middle,” he said.

  it was about this time that I decided not to give any more poetry readings, then I got a letter from Dave, he had moved to Vermont or was it New Hampshire? he stated that our friendship had been so great and now he was in Vermont or New Hampshire and he was back with Jan again, it was very strange, they just met on the street one day, anyhow, Dave said he wanted to renew our friendship but I never answered his letter because I didn’t want to tell him, no, Dave, we never really had a friendship even though it had been nice of him to line me up with that ass and that place in that court, and also that I had been honored that he had offered to let me read in his bookstore, but like I said, I never answered and Dave probably thinks I’ve gotten the fathead and think that I am hot shit because I’ve gotten a few books published and maybe it’s true, I only hope not.

  Bombay Gin, Summer 1990

  INTRODUCTIONS

  AND CRITICISM

  Editors (and Others) Write

  Anyone can be an editor, but not everyone should be. The least these fly-by-nighters, who mostly have money dreams and dreams of under-the-counter recognition by fellow(?) editors, could do is to return submissions. You list them in Trace, and we send—many of us not egotistical enough to keep carbons. Or energetic enough. How cold can a man or woman be, simply to wastebasket poetry sent in good faith, with return postage and envelope? And this is not an ordinary occurrence, it is a continuous one.

  Furthermore, many of the editors of so-called avant-gardes, besides racking one with delays of years in actual publication or, finally, no publication at all, except (during this yawn of nothingness) an exchange of correspondence and ideas and general b.s.,—and often, when not coinciding with their thought-patterns, a return of accepted material ensues.

  I have often taken the isolationist stand that all that matters is the creation of the poem, the pure art form. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or wall
s or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged—all this is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can (or can’t) carve upon a white sheet of paper. And if I can see more poetry in the Santa Anita stretch or drunk under the banana tree than in a smoky room of lavender rhyming, that is up to me; and only time will judge which climate was proper.—not some jackass second-rate editor afraid of a printer’s bill and trying to ham it on subscriptions and coddling contributors. If the boys are trying to make a million, there’s always the market, the lonely widows, or the John Dillinger approach.

  Let’s not find out some day that Dillinger’s poetry was better than ours and that the Kenyon Review was right. Right now, under the banana tree, I’m beginning to see sparrows where I once saw hawks; and their song is not too bitter for me.

  Trace 36, March–April 1960

  Little Magazines in America: Conclusion of Symposium

  It might be a little too late to hear about the “littles” from me, and also the horses walked over me today, so all in bad shape, so, hell, fine, I’ll tell you all that I know about the “little” magazines. They are a scurvy lot, most of them, run by homosexuals, madmen, posers, people with acne, fast-buckers, snivelers, religious old ladies, whippers of hounds, and so forth. Mail out a selection of poetry and chances are:

  1. you won’t get it back.

  2. you’ll get it back with a promise of publication but it will never be published.

  3. your work will be returned, after some years, without either a rejection slip or a note.

  4. they will think you a genius and they will come to your door to look at you and drink your beer and talk.

  5. you will get semi-literary letters from divorced ladies with children or from ladies with various maladies such as:

  6. missing leg.

  7. overfat butt

  8. a love for Henry James

  9. a stock of old poems about the sea and the moon.

  Many of these magazines are started by young people without drive or followthrough, imbued with the first flush of life without mama, tangled with tapes, gin, easy lore, unrealistic romanticism, manes, scandals, accents, politics, the front-lawn love of dogs, familiarity with jazz and a touch of pot, and god knows what else and God doesn’t damn well care and neither do I, except they waste our time, my time, and I’m an old bear and I have some talent but not much time, and if I am going to waste it myself and not have it done for me by a group of amateurs who believe the Literary Life is something they’ve read somewhere instead of being New when our blood can hardly bear the world, and the only honor is carving what we can before they find us dead in some alley and our canned heat and our pale purple rejects from Poetry Chicago.

  We are at the mercy of these people, these fakirs, because the way we write can only be sent, with our liquored grief of homage, to small publications that will not be seen laying around on chairs in the barbershop or on Aunt Emma’s frontporch swing or down with her bloomers in the bottom drawer either. We’ve got to take the gamble and hope it’s better than betting the horses; but the horses have been g.d. better and the whores, and the rats too. I’ve lost over 200 poems into the space of literary amateurism and fakism and soft-ass-ism. I do not keep carbons. Why not? you ask. That’s a thing in the mind that tells me that if I keep carbons, I too am a posturer looking for gravy and easy light. Hell, you say, haven’t you any respect for your work? No, no, I don’t. Not after it’s written. Then, it’s dead. Who wants Christmas trees in April? And yet I bitch because these poems (and stories) have been destroyed or asswiped, I bitch not out of personal loss of a creation of Art (?) but from the fact that they will not face up, these putrid overnight editors; they hide, destroy, malface, eradicate, pollute, damage, piss-on, masturbate away the little hope I have of honor between men and women and g.d. trees and silence and a rose whacking it up in a glass of liquor.

  I shoot these things out on a thin stem to these people because when I get drunk I write a good deal and I am drunk a good deal of the time and I get embarrassed sending poems to the same places especially when these places tend to accept my work. It is like going to the same whore two nights in a row; it just isn’t done. If the thing is still working you got to stick it someplace else.

  Little magazines (and I wish to god they wouldn’t call themselves “little” but literary; it is a mind state that builds smallness—let’s use the good words) tend to start well if they are going to start at all, but it is not long before they begin to be formed by pressures, the pressures of opinions and other editors, critics, readers, writers, printers, street car conductors, lady friends, university libraries, eunuchs, soothsayers, subscribers, punks, dilettantes, clowns, fame-seekers, and the steam and stench and grip and strappado of going down to the heavy Voice of the Thing Outside telling us what to do. Eventually the average literary magazine becomes the front room of one group of tea drinkers. This ravage of reality and wideness is most common and those who break bread together also toss the worn ribbons of their Underwoods into the same shrine and praise and comradey, ejaculating warm literary handshakes across the same worn table. Shit, this does not make ART! I would rather run in the forest with ten dogs looking for some poor stick of meat than have hand in their photo-snapping, allengulfing GROUPS: BLACK MOUNTAIN; BIG TABLE; GINSBERG; CORSO, BURROUGHS, WHAT THE HELL else group the mountain-sheep watchers and so forth. And Martinelli writes me that old man Pound knew what he was doing and that the Communists are XXXXXX. I agree that old man Pound sometimes knew what he was doing but I will not admit that the Communists are XXXXXX. I would rather admit to the obvious: that mankind, given the soul and the opportunity of the history of centuries of Art and History and what else, turns it down for a can of beans and a light in the mirror that makes monkeys, I will only admit that Mankind is (or are) XXXXXX.

  What I am getting at with all this slaver is that you don’t have to be a XXXXX to use one. Nor do you have to use one to be one. The little magazines, on the whole are a XXXXX mess. You wouldn’t catch me at the nearest bar with one, or any other place where I have to, or hope to, hold my head high for a little while.

  And when we are all dead, and the small weeping ceases and the grass grows on the countryside and the rabbit comes out and stares stupidly at the sunshine, then, I guess, baby, it will be clean for a while—for a while—for a while—you can’t have it all—you can’t have it all—we don’t have it g.d. now!

  Ah, I know the subject was the Little Magazine. What a subject. Let’s talk about the use of the 4-edged screwdriver. I’m out of beer. I have four dollars left which will buy me 12 good bottles plus a pack of cigarettes. The whiskey makes blood. Met a guy on the corner today, black beard, asked me for 50 cents. Glad I didn’t give it to him. Might have been a little magazine editor.

  Mainstream, Vol. 16, No. 6, June 1963

  Introduction to John William Corrington, Mr. Clean and Other Poems

  I am not saying that you cannot find a better poet if you look hard enough; there are enough of them blowing and mewing, god knows. But William Corrington’s oblique and viscid honings recommend a little more than burial in the slush pile.

  I remember, upon reading the early works of Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, I had the feeling of the words themselves digging into the page, gripping, or being like rocks at the bottom of a clear river. This is an essence that cannot be garnered by trickery.

  Corrington, although he is a poet, is also a shaper of the word that cannot be brushed away. There is this curious digging in. And I’ll be damned if I can ignore it. I have tried.

  John William Corrington, Mr. Clean and Other Poems,

  San Francisco: Amber House, 1964

  The Corybant of Wit: Review of Irving Layton, The Laughing Rooster

  Here I am in Los Angeles, California, eating an apple, drinking coffee, and talking about a “legend.” The back cover calls Irving Layton a legend and I do suppose it’s true, especially down here where most of us
don’t buy his books and his poems have filtered down through reviews, quotations, over drinks, and in letters. Now, at last, I have gotten hold of his latest book and it sits here with me in this breakfastnook like a beautiful drunken whore. These are the latest poems except for four which were pulled out of fading yellow newspapers by one George Edelstein and which our rooster says, “. . . gave the first signs of my impending genius. . . .”

  The apple and the coffee are finished. Let’s get into some white meat and maybe a drumstick. Irving Layton resides astride the back of a rooster upon the front cover. They both look pretty cocky, having a way with the hens.

  Layton begins with a preface, which takes some doing. When Loujon Press asked me to do a preface to my coming collection of poems Crucifix in a Deathhand I found I could not do it. I found I got to talking about the night I slept on a park bench in El Paso, Texas, and then went into the library hungry and read Notes from Underground by one Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881). The idea was to tell them something of the poet’s life (mine) but most of us have lived rotten lives and I decided why drag them through all the drunks, whorehouses, factories, jails, roominghouses, hospitals? The poems, in one way or another, do that. So I spat it out and told them to get another boy for that sort of thing. There’s nothing more deadly than talking about your own poetry; the gods make it this way, and if you haven’t been fattened or sugared too much, you listen to the gods. Layton dives in. “Can anyone really explain what happens in the writing of a poem?” he asks. He notes that Freud has tried and Dr. Northrop Frye, and mentions Plato’s assurance that “the poet is an inspired dunce.” For those of you not familiar with the passage it is where Socrates speaks to Ion:

  In fact, all the good poets who make epic poems use no art at all, but they are inspired and possessed when they utter all these beautiful poems, and so are the good lyric poets: these are not in their right minds when they make their beautiful songs, but they are like Corybants out of their wits dancing about.