Living on Luck

by Charles Bukowski

  decidedly yours, Henry Armstrong

  [To John Martin]

  September 12, 1971

  Thanks for the stamps, big dad, but I see the Waldorf towers a long way off, if ever. A bare survival unto death is my dream. The life I live now is dangerous but good. And I think too that in my second year at it the writing is gluing itself together more. Although the enclosed poems are more comfortable than great, I think a few goodies sit waiting, smoking cigars and talking in the waiting room of my head. And I haven’t thought of a title for the next book of poems but will work on it SOON big boss. —oh yes, the sculptress and I split continually; I always think it’s over; next thing you know we’re back together again. mercy, reason and logic have very little place in my life. great then.

  the flying ace, Major Henry

  E. V. Griffith had published Bukowski’s first book in 1960, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. See volume 1, passim.

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  September 27, 1971

  The 50 looked good, doctor. I don’t know if you know but I quit my job at age 50…a supposedly good civil service gig…a couple of years ago and am living on my luck, so all such checks contain an immense spiritual as well as practical lift. Practical in that it allows me to go on and spiritual in the fact that it allows me to go on in the way I want to. I think my writing has upped itself since I quit work; there’s more energy and more humor and more life in the lines. But actually, I didn’t quit the job for the good of literature, for the good of The Poem, but because the Motherfarting job was really killing me. I was in the doctor’s office once or twice a week, one thing or another. I couldn’t lift my arms up to my shoulders; my whole body was one mass of pain; white blisters broke out on the tops and bottoms of both hands; dizzy spells…man, I was DYING FROM THE UNHAPPINESS OF DOING THE OTHER MAN’S THING FOR 50 YEARS. I suppose a writer is not supposed to be too happy is he? I have moments of great depression now when I think I am going crazy, but I also have hours to LOLL AROUND IN LIKE BEACHWATER, and it fills, man, it fills like sunlight and love. I deserve a small slice of minor contentment; I have it coming; for this moment the gods are letting it come my way. Total suffering without relief is useless.

  Then too, the love of the female is more apt to come around when one is rested, when one is a bum, when one is lounging over a typer with coffee and rolled cigarette at 3 in the afternoon, then love is more apt to arrive. Love doesn’t like time clocks and some dog giving his guts to a punch press. All I am saying is that things have been mighty damned good…meaning I am surviving, I am paying the rent, the child support, the health is bouncing, the love is good…I take out the garbage cans and bring them back in to knock ten dollars off the rent. I sleep until noon and go to bed at 2 or 3 a.m. And I’ve learned to live with that typewriter. I mean, I wait until it’s ready, or I think I wait until it’s ready. I still write bad stuff but it’s all in the flow, in the working, it counts, it helps somehow. Don’t get me wrong, the world hasn’t changed, and I know I can be out on the street soon enough. I’ve even gone up on the hill with the bums and taken them beer and beans and crackers and smokes. They live in the trees up there above the freeway. It’s green and it’s quiet and it’s tolerable if anything is tolerable. But there ain’t any mailbox up there and you can’t very well type or write up there. But the luck is holding. The Black Sparrow books, Days and Post Office keep going into reprintings and there’s a new book of poems coming up, and also Ferlinghetti says there will be a book of short stories soon. I’ve been lucky in the fact that I haven’t gotten famous and rich through, say, a one-shot novel via a big publishing house. The gods have let me go on like this, getting by. It’s good for the inner springs, the old gut mattress. It couldn’t be planned better if I had chosen the way myself. [***]

  [To John Martin]

  October 5, 1971

  I’m a bit depressed but, then, haven’t I always been? I do like these poems, tho, better than the last batch I sent you, but, like you know, maybe out of 50 poems written, maybe one comes through as it should. I have learned to wait more and press less, and I believe that has helped the writing. I now figure that I am writing when I am doing nothing and that it takes a lot of doing nothing in order to write. What I mean is, that sorting mail while waiting is destructive; doing nothing is doing something…we learn so slowly and when we’ve almost learned it all, it’s about too late.

  I wanted to enclose the letter from this editor saying that Creeley stated that I was the only poet that he disliked, but can’t find it. I’m plenty up on Creeley, I almost dislike all the poets. But, then, he’s intelligent. [***]

  [To Steve Richmond]

  November 5, 1971

  sure, o.k. on Laugh. outa sentimentality I’d like to see it go an issue or 2 more. I think our covers were the most immortal part of the magazine, but—. also, we lost our files. that is, the subscribers and libraries, and when we had them, our good friend N [eeli] ignored them. the only way I know about them is when they write us. I am trying to fill some orders now. so, everything is fucked up but I don’t think we owe anybody anything, so if you want to take over this leaking laughing boat, fine. I’ll presume that you will and I will forward all Laugh Lit. mail to you, o.k.? although lately I have been telling the submitters that Laugh is dead so they prob. will not come around again. no loss, from what I read.

  ah, Steve, the FEMALE. there is no way. don’t wait for the good woman. she doesn’t exist. there are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. the female loves to play man against man. and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. the male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. the female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and damnation. never envy a man his lady. behind it all lays a living hell. I know you’re not going to quit the chase, but when you go into it, for Christ’s sake, realize that you are going to be burned ahead of time. never go in totally open. the madhouses and skidrows are full of those. remember, the female is any man’s woman at any time. the choice is hers. and she’s going to rip the son of a bitch she goes to just like she ripped you. but never hate the woman. understand that she is channeled this way and let her go. solitude too brings a love as tall as the mountains. fuck the skies. amen.

  god, I talk more about cunt than I do about literature. literature is a hairy cunt. I know how to love a woman but a good poem will last longer, and almost every man can have a hairy cunt. put your chips on a winner—on the inner-gut sight. if you treat it well it will never betray you. and

  laugh literary and MAN THE HUMPING GUNS, baby.

  [To John Martin]

  November 19, 1971

  Thanks for sending the Wakoski books. I should get into them soon. I know that she has a nice loose line that does not restrict her thinking like most of those slick-ass men.

  I am still going through a certain phrasolegy (spell?) that is taking some of the energy from my writing, but it’s explorative, and, I think, hardly life-taking—say, as the Post Office was. I think, in the end (if I last) it will pay off in the writing, not only now but later, and it will also pay off as a chunk of real-ass living. Of course, I’m making a lot of errors. I always have. It’s almost that by going wrong I get to the mother light. I think you know what I mean.

  I just turned down two offers to drink tonight—their booze—too many good-time Charlies like to suck off of my energy. All right, like I say, after the Jon Webb* memoriam thing, we walk back into the buzzsaw of the poetry-prose blaze, and HOW IS OUR NEW BOOK OF POEMS COMING ALONG, DEAR FATHER? I need a new book of poems…it has been quite some time. get to work on it, get to work, get to work, get to work, on it…[***]

  [To Gregory Maronick]

  November 26, 1971

  Thanks for the letter. I think that if some of your students hate me, i
t’s a good sign. I think if they all hated me it would be a better sign. If I ever get as loved as Rod McKuen I’ll know I’m as bad as R.M. What defines a poetry as poetry or any art form as an art form is puzzling. I suppose it takes a century or so and then, even then, I feel we’re often mistaken. All a man can do is write what he feels like writing. This isn’t as easy as it sounds; to get down to yourself takes all manner of things, but bad luck, madness, such things help. Don’t let me preach. All right. I won’t.

  I ran out of the post office to a typewriter to try my luck. At first, it was all right. Readings, stories in sex mags; poems on the side. Then along came the tight money situation. The readings stopped. The sex mags, which used to pay 30 days after acceptance, have not only halved their rates but I now have 2 or 3 stories on the stands and I haven’t even received the purchase orders yet. On top of this I have met this mad woman 20 years younger than myself. She is a tremendous flirt, hits on men continually, dances like a hot whore, but she doesn’t fuck the guys, but it’s such a drag, and she’s nice in bed and when she’s nice she’s nice out of bed, but she’s schitzi, has done time, and she has these tremendous runs of ups and downs, plus and minus. I get down plenty myself. I can look the other way on a lot of things except maybe just simple rudeness and unfeelingness. I don’t mean to slop all this over you. But it’s been one god damned battle after another. This eats into creative time. This eats into everything. We split 2 or 3 times a week. Simple madness. But it’s destructive and I’m trying to work my way out of it. Like yesterday, I lay out 15 bucks and here’s this big turkey on the table and all the other stuff, her two kids have eaten, my kid has eaten, next thing I know we’re at each other and I’m walking out the door. She phones collect at my place 3 hours later, pretending she is another lady (?), but it’s her and she claims she’s in Phoenix. Goodbye, I say, and hang up. I mean, this goes on and on. It eats. If she found another guy or I found a kinder woman, we could both let go. It’s killing. I don’t mean to be unfair but I do think she came by because she had read my books, some of them anyhow, and she thought it might be interesting to see what this writer was. That’s no way to move in on a man. She sees me sitting in a chair, she doesn’t see me, she sees a Charles Bukowski. I can’t perform Charles Bukowski for her, I am sick of that son of a bitch. I swear, if I ever meet a kind woman I don’t care if she has a wooden leg or a glass eye or both or all, I’ll run off to Alaska with her or China or East Lansing and we’ll live together and die together. By kind, I don’t mean a woman who will kiss my ass, I mean a woman who is simply gentle by nature. All these L.A. women are HARD. Their eyes are hard, their movements, their calculations. Maybe they have to be. maybe I’m hard too. I don’t think so. My poems, maybe, but me, no. ah ah ah. [***]

  Big crazy kid over last night. We got to talking about PAIN, about the world out there and about going on, how hard it was just to go on, you know, the way the women were, the way everything was. And I told the kid, “Listen, you know how it happens. Sometimes I’m in the bedroom, just kind of walking around, like I’m looking for a paperclip, and it hits me—PAIN—it’s like a guy has punched me in the stomach—I double over and hold my stomach—I can feel the spot—I can feel the HOLE—it’s pain, the terror, the not understanding—I’ve had ulcers, that’s not it—this is just the thing coming down and getting you…” “I know,” he said, “I get the same thing. Sometimes I cry. It’s a silent crying but I can feel the tears running down…”

  So, you see, Gregory, the way isn’t easy for any of us. Dylan drank his way out. Hem and Van Gogh liked shotguns. Chatterton rat poison. I can feel it now as I am typing. I am saying to the sounds of the typewriter, make it go away, make everything go away, but it doesn’t. I can see it out there now. DeLongpre Ave. The world. A spiderweb of dung. Survival is an indecent dribbling spittle. o.k.

  [To John Martin]

  December 3, 1971

  Gertrude Stein, eh? Who’s that? While all us young writers starve…God, it’s dark. It rained last night. I got out of a warm bed in Burbank and drove home in the rain and when I got there the wind Gertrude Steined through the broken glass of my front door and I sat there shivering and drinking my tiny bottle of Schlitz wondering when the elephants were going to come along and kick some decent shit literature out of me, and meanwhile, here’s the enclosed.

  *Jon Webb had died on June 9, 1971.

  · 1972 ·

  John Berryman committed suicide on January 7, 1972 and Kenneth Patchen died on January 8.

  [To Carl Weissner]

  January [?10], 1972

  [***] well, Patchen left and John Berryman jumped off a bridge last Friday and they haven’t found him yet. They say Berryman was on a quart of whiskey a day, or so somebody told me. I never saw him or it. The field narrows, babe, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else coming on.

  I heard from one of your buddies, Joris, in London. He’s on some kind of onion, trying to translate me into the French. Another guy I know is fumbling me into Italian. Also, some guy teaching French at U.C.L.A. is working on getting some poems of mine into the French, so, shit, it’s buzzing…Recession here, and mags like Knight, Adam, have more than halved their rates…which means I gotta write twice as many dirty stories. This writing game is more desperate than holding up liquor stores, yet I’m snared in now and there’s no out. A man’s ass finally gets lazy, too lazy and the mind gets too crazy to do any damned job. Now I’m almost too lazy to write. An empty belly and rent due might stove that up a bit, though. Norse pulled out of Venice and went weeping up to S.F. in search of kinder souls…I’m still on with the sculptress and it’s unsolvable…I judge everything—women, no women, booze, no booze—on my writing. I’m writing better but less. There, that’s sensible. [***]

  [To John Martin]

  [from Phoenix, Arizona]

  January 12, 1972

  Well, I’m out in the desert and I can use the check. Mother, it’s hot in here, they turn the heat too high…well, tomorrow I’m going to try to set up in the cacti somewhere with this machine and get into some poems, stories, the novel…I’ve been lax long enough. There are 4 or 5 sisters and a friend out here; they’re all writing novels…. every place you turn you see another writer. blind guy came in—he’s writing two novels. writers, writers, writers—I leave DeLongpre to get rid of that gang and here I am surrounded again. Well, there may be a story in all this; meanwhile I’m with Linda, which is fulfilling when we’re on. gangs of children running through, dogs, relatives, tv going, but it’s all fairly nice—they tend to ignore me which is a good way of being accepted. [***]

  [To John Martin]

  January 17, 1972

  [***] I don’t understand this desert out here. It looks like something that wanted to give up but didn’t know quite how. The brush is yellow, no, brown and tired and desperate. And the horses and cattle, they just don’t care. They lay or stand and wait, wait, wait, Everything here is waiting. That’s the feel of it. Or like this is the last edge of the world and it’s all too tired to fall off. The cowboys, too, seem indifferent. The people. They walk around and their faces show neither pain or concern or worry. They are like their horses and cattle. Well, that’s good and a change from L.A.-Hollywood where everybody is hard and on the hustle and with the front, and most of them not having it at all. Well, hell.

  [***] There are 3 typewriters going at once here. Can I have set these sisters on fire? Hello to Barbara. Bukowski marches on. He’ll live to be 80. I always wanted to die in the year 2,000. Of course, the whole gang of us may leave at once before then, or almost at once. A cat below where I am typing just grabbed my toe, bit and scratched it. There’s something cooking in the kitchen; the love is good, the cat climbs my leg now, purring and digging in his “fingernails,” as Linda’s daughter calls them…Is this the literary life? Why not? The fire from the devil’s beard stews the afternoon air. Don’t give up on me. uh uh.

  [To Carl Weissner]

  January [?18], 1972


  well, god damn, here I am in Phoenix, Ariz. [***] and I ought to be here until Feb. 10 or 12th this year, if I don’t go giraffe…like one time I was out here and couldn’t bear up under conditions and I took me a 3 hour stroll in the desert. It seems easier this time—so far. staying here with my gal friend and her sister, and there’s another sister on another ranch across the way, and I play the poet-writer but so far as writing goes I’ve done little, have made local racetrack—Turf Paradise—3 times with moderate success driving my gal’s polka dot car with Calif. license plates, and I now got me kinda long hair and a shitty beard and there is madness in my eyes, of course, and I like driving around in the polka dot, the locals don’t get the angle—there isn’t any.

  by the way, you see Herman, you tell him I ain’t pissed because my girlfriend kissed him goodbye when he came over to see me. I made her kiss 5 guys at the end of one of my parties to show them what they’re missing; of course, I frown upon anybody else fucking her—I tend to like the unmolested pisshole. [***]

  these 3 sisters are all mad, sexy, intelligent, liberal…and they’re all writing novels…about sex, oral copulation, insanity…and the cactus is out there, and there’s beer and smokes and change and evenings when you can see the bored stars, I stand, old companion, with you in the battle, we will have both victory and death, fire and water, love and hate, noon and midnight, I wish you plenty, well, hang in.

  [To Carl Weissner]