Tales of Ordinary Madness

by Charles Bukowski

  “I still think a revolution would get rid of a lot of shit.”

  “win or lose, it will. it’ll get rid of a lot of good things and bad. human history moves very slowly. me, I’ll settle for a bird-bath.”

  “the better to observe from.”

  “the better to observe from. have another beer.”

  “you still sound like a reactionary.”

  “listen, Rabbi, I’m trying to see the thing from all sides, not just my side. the Establishment is very cool. you’ve got to give them that. I’ll talk with the Establishment any time. I know that I’m dealing with a tough boy. look at what they did to Spock. both Kennedys. King. Malcolm X. you make your list. it’s a long one. you can’t move too fast on the big boys or you’ll find yourself whistling Dixie through a cardboard toiletpaper holder at Forest Lawn. but things are changing. the young are thinking better than the old used to think and the old are dying. there’s still a way to do it without everybody getting murdered.”

  “they’ve got you backtracking. with me, ‘Give me Victory or Death.’ ”

  “that’s what Hitler said. he got death.”

  “what’s wrong with death?”

  “the question before us tonight is what’s wrong with life.”

  “you write a book like TERROR STREET and then you want to sit around and shake hands with killers.”

  “have we shaken hands, Rabbi?”

  “you talk out of the side of your mouth while cruelties are happening at this very moment.”

  “you mean the spider with the fly or the cat with the mouse?”

  “I mean Man against Man when Man has the facility to know better.”

  “there’s something in what you say.”

  “Hell yes. you’re not the only one with a mouth.”

  “then what do you say we do? burn the town?”

  “no, burn the nation.”

  “like I say, you’ll be a hell of a Rabbi.”

  “thank you.”

  “and after we burn the nation, we replace it with what?”

  “would you say that the American Revolution failed, that the French Revolution failed, that the Russian Revolution failed?”

  “not entirely. but they sure fell short.”

  “it was a try.”

  “how many men must we kill in order to move forward one inch?”

  “how many men are killed by not moving at all?”

  “sometimes I feel like I’m talking with Plato.”

  “you are: Plato with a Jewish beard.”

  it gets quiet then and the problem hangs between us. meanwhile, the skidrows are filled with the disenchanted and the discarded; the poor die in charity wards among a scarcity of doctors; the jails are so filled with the disorded and the lost that there are not enough bunks and the prisoners must sleep on the floor. to get on relief is an act of mercy that may not last and the madhouses are stuffed wall to wall because of a society that uses people like chess pawns ...

  it’s damned pleasant to be an intellectual or a writer and to observe these niceties as long as your OWN ass is not in the wringer. that’s ONE thing that’s wrong with intellectuals and writers – they don’t feel a hell of a lot except their own comfort or their own pain. which is normal but shitty.

  “and congress,” says my friend, “believes they can solve something with a gun-control bill.”

  “yeah. actually we know who has been shooting most of the guns. but we are not so sure who has been shooting some of the others. is it the army, the police, the state, or some other madmen? I’m afraid to guess for I may be next and I have a few more sonnets I’d like to finish.”

  “I don’t think that you are important enough.”

  “thank god for that, Rabbi.”

  “I think, though, that you have a bit of the coward in you.”

  “yes, I do. a coward is a man who can foresee the future. a brave man is almost always without imagination.”

  “sometimes I think YOU would make a good Rabbi.”

  “not so. Plato had no Jewish beard.”

  “grow one.”

  “have a beer.”

  “thank you.”

  and so, we become quiet. it is another strange evening. the people come to me, they talk, they fill me: the future Rabbis, the revolutionaries with their rifles, the FBI, the whores, the poetesses, the young poets from Cal State, a professor from Loyola going to Michigan, a prof from the University of Cal at Berkeley, another who lives in Riverside, 3 or 4 boys on the road, plain bums with Bukowski books stashed in their brains ... and for a while I thought that this gang would intrude upon and murder my fair and precious moments, but I’ve been lucky lucky for each man and each woman has brought me something and left me something, and I no longer must feel like Jeffers behind a stone wall, and I’ve been lucky in another way for what fame I have is largely hidden and quiet and I’ll hardly ever be a Henry Miller with people camping on my front lawn, the gods have been very good to me, they’ve kept me alive and even, still kicking, taking notes, observing, feeling the goodness of good people, feeling the miracle run up my arm like a crazy mouse. such a life, given to me at the age of 48, even though tomorrow does not know is the sweetest of the sweet dreams.

  the kid gets up a bit full of beer, tomorrow’s Rabbi thundering across Sunday morning breakfasts.

  “got to make it. class tomorrow.”

  “sure, kid, are you all right?”

  “yeah. I’m all right. my dad says to say hello to you.”

  “you tell Sam I said to hang it in. we’ve all got to make it.”

  “you got my phone number?”

  “yeah. right over my left tit.”

  I watch him leave. down the steps. a little fat. but good that way. power. excess power. he is glowing and rumbling. he will make a fine Rabbi. I like him very much. then he is gone, out of vision, and I sit down to write you this. cigarette ashes all across the typewriter. to let you know how it goes and what’s next. next to my typewriter are 2 small white doll’s shoes about half an inch long. my daughter, Marina, left them there. she’s in Arizona, somewhere, about now, with a revolutionary mother. it’s July 1968 and I hit the machine as I wait for the door to break down and see the two green-faced men with eyes the shade of stale jelly, air-cooled hand m.g.’s. I hope they don’t show. it’s been a lovely evening. and only a few lone partridges will remember the roll of the dice and the way the walls smiled. good night.

  BEER AND POETS AND TALK

  it was a hell of a night. Willie had slept in the weeds outside Bakersfield the night before. Dutch was there, and a buddy. the beer was on me. I made sandwiches. Dutch kept talking about literature, poetry; I tried to get him off it but he laid right in there. Dutch runs a bookshop around Pasadena or Glendale or somewhere. then talk about the riots came up. they asked me what I thought about the riots and I told them that I was waiting, that the thoughts would have to come by themselves. it was nice to be able to wait. Willie picked up one of my cigars, took the paper off, lit it.

  somebody said, “how come you’re writing a column? you used to laugh at Lipton for writing a column, now you’re doing the same thing.”

  “Lipton writes a kind of left-wing Walter Winchell thing. I create Art. there’s a difference.”

  “hey, man, you got any more of these green onions?” asked Willie.

  I went into the kitchen for more green onions and beer. Willie was one right out of the book – a book that hadn’t been written yet. he was a mass of hair, head and beard. bluejeans with patches. one week he was in Frisco. 2 weeks later he was in Albuquerque. then, somewhere else. he carried with him, everywhere, this batch of poems he had accepted for his magazine. whether the crazy magazine ever evolved or not was anybody’s guess. Willie the Wire, slim, bouncy, immortal. he wrote very well. even when he put the knock on somebody it was a kind of without hatred knock. he just laid the statement down, then it was yours. a graceful carelessness.

  I cracked some new beers. Dutch w
as still on literature. he had just published “18th Dynasty Egyptian Automobile Turnon” by D. R. Wagner. and a nice job too. Dutch’s young buddy just listened – he was the new breed: quiet but very much there.

  Willie worked on an onion. “I talked to Neal Cassady. he’s gone completely crazy.”

  “yeah, he’s begging for busts. it’s stupid. building a forced myth. being in Kerouac’s book screwed up his mind.”

  “man,” I said, “there’s nothing like a bit of dirty literary gossip, is there?”

  “sure,” said Dutch, “let’s talk shop. everybody talks shop.”

  “listen, Bukowski, do you think that there’s any poetry being written now? by anybody? Lowell made time, you know.”

  “almost all the great names have died recently – Frost, cummings, Jeffers, W. C. Williams, T. S. Eliot, the rest. a couple of nights ago, Sandburg. in a very short period, they all seemed to die together, throw in Vietnam and the ever-riots and it has been a very strange and quick and festering and new age. look at those skirts now, almost up around the ass. we are moving very quickly and I like it, it is not bad. but the Establishment is worried about its culture. culture is a steadier. there’s nothing as good as a museum, a Verdi opera or a stiff-neck poet to hold back progress. Lowell was rushed into the breach, after a careful check of credentials. Lowell is interesting enough not to put you to sleep but diffuse enough so as not to be dangerous. the first thoughts you have after reading his work is, this baby has never missed a meal or even had a flat tire or a toothache. Creeley is a near similarity, and I imagine the Establishment balanced Creeley and Lowell for some time but had to finally come up with Lowell because Creeley just didn’t seem like such a very good dull guy, and you couldn’t trust him as much – he might even show up at the president’s lawn party and tickle the guests with his beard. so, it had to be Lowell, and so it’s Lowell we’ve got.”

  “so who’s writing it? where are they?”

  “not in America. and there are only 2 that I can think of. Harold Norse who is nursing his melancholia-hypochondria in Switzerland, taking handouts from rich backers, and having the running shits, fainting spells, the fear of ants, so forth. and writing very little now, kind of going crazy like the rest of us. but then WHEN he writes, it’s all there. the other guy is Al Purdy. not Al Purdy the novelist, I mean Al Purdy the poet. they are not the same people. Al Purdy lives in Canada and grows his own grapes which he squeezes into his own wine. he is a drunk, an old hulk of a man who must now be somewhere in his mid-forties. his wife supports him so he can write his poetry, which, you’ve got to admit, is some wonderful kind of wife. I’ve never met one like that or have you. but, anyhow, the Canadian government is always laying some kind of grant on him, $4,000 here and there, and they send him up to the Pole to write about life there, and he does it, crazy clear poems about birds and people and dogs. god damn, he wrote a book of poems once called “Songs for All the Annettes” and I almost cried all the way through the book reading it. it’s nice to look up sometimes, it’s nice to have heroes, it’s nice to have somebody else carrying some of the load.”

  “don’t you think you write as well as they?”

  “only at times. most of the time, no.”

  the beer ran out and I had to take a shit. I gave Willie a five and told him it’d be good if he got 2 six packs, tall, Schlitz (this is an advertisement), and all 3 of them left and I went in and sat down. it wasn’t bad to be more or less asked questions of the age. it was better yet to be doing what I was doing. I thought about the hospitals, the racetracks, some of the women I used to know, some of the women I had buried, outdrunk, outfucked but not outargued. the alcoholic madwomen who had brought love to me especially and in their own way. then I heard it through the wall:

  “listen, Johnny, you ain’t even kissed me in a week. what’s wrong, Johnny? listen, talk to me, I want you to talk to me.”

  “god damn you, get away from me. I don’t want to talk to you. LEAVE ME ALONE, WILL YOU? GOD DAMN YOU, LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  “listen, Johnny, I just want you to talk to me, I can’t stand it. you don’t have to touch me, just talk to me, jesus christ Johnny I can’t stand it, I CAN’T STAND IT, JESUS!”

  “GOD DAMN IT, I TOLD YOU TO LEAVE ME ALONE! LEAVE ME ALONE, GOD DAMN YOU, LEAVE ME ALONE, LEAVE ME ALONE, LEAVE ME ALONE, WILL YOU?”

  “Johnny ...”

  he hit her a good one. open hand. a real good one. I almost fell off the stool. I heard her choking off the crap and walking off.

  then Dutch and Willie and crew were back. they ripped open the cans. I finished my business and walked back in.

  “I’m gonna get up an anthology,” said Dutch, “an anthology of the best living poets, I mean the real best.”

  “sure,” said Willie, “why not?” then he saw me: “enjoy your crap?”

  “not too much.”

  “no?”

  “no.”

  “you need more roughage. you ought to eat more green onions.”

  “you think so?”

  “yeah.”

  I reached over and got 2 of them, jammed them down. maybe next time would be better. meanwhile there were riots, beer, talk, literature, and the lovely young ladies were making the fat millionaires happy. I reached over, got one of my own cigars, took off the paper, took off the cigar band, jammed the thing into my screwed-up and complex face, then lit it, the cigar. bad writing’s like bad women: there’s just not much you can do about it.

  I SHOT A MAN IN RENO

  Bukowski cried when Judy Garland sang at the N.Y. Philharmonic, Bukowski cried when Shirley Temple sang “I Got Animal Crackers in my Soup”; Bukowski cried in cheap flophouses, Bukowski can’t dress, Bukowski can’t talk, Bukowski is scared of women, Bukowski has a bad stomach, Bukowski is full of fears, and hates dictionaries, nuns, pennies, busses, churches, parkbenches, spiders, flies, fleas, freaks; Bukowski didn’t go to war. Bukowski is old, Bukowski hasn’t flown a kite for 45 years; if Bukowski were an ape they’d run him out of the tribe ...

  my friend is so worried about tearing the meat of my soul from my bones that he hardly seems to think of his own existence.

  “but Bukowski pukes real neat and I’ve never seen him piss on the floor.”

  so I do have charm after all, you see. then he throws open a little door and there in a 3 by 6 room stacked with papers and rags is an out.

  “you can always stay here, Bukowski. you’ll never want.”

  no window, no bed, but I’m next to the bathroom. it still looks good to me.

  “but you may have to wear earplugs because of the music I keep playing.”

  “I can pick up a set, I’m sure.”

  we walk back into his den. “you wanna hear some Lenny Bruce?”

  “no, thanks.”

  “Ginsberg?”

  “no, no.”

  he just has to keep that tape machine going, or the record player. they finally hit me with Johnny Cash singing to the boys at Folsom.

  “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”

  it seems to me that Johnny is giving them a little shit just like I suspect Bob Hope does to the boys at Viet during Xmas, but I have this kind of mind. the boys holler, they are out of their cells but I feel like it’s something like tossing meatless bones instead of biscuits to the hungered and the trapped. I don’t feel a damn thing holy or brave about it. there’s only one thing to do for men in jail: let ‘em out. there’s only one thing to do for men at war: stop the war.

  “turn it off,” I ask.

  “whatsa matta?”

  “it’s a trick. a publicity man’s dream.”

  “you can’t say that. Johnny’s done time.”

  “a lot of people have.”

  “we think it’s good music.”

  “I like his voice. but the only man who can sing in jail, really, is a man who is in jail, really.”

  “we still like it.”

  his wife is there and a couple of young black men who
play combo in some band.

  “Bukowski likes Judy Garland. Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

  “I liked her that one time in N.Y. her soul was up. you couldn’t beat her.”

  “she’s overweight and a lush.”

  it was the same old thing – people tearing meat and not getting anywhere. I leave a little early. as I do, I hear them put J. Cash back on.

  I stop for some beer and just make it in as the phone is ringing.

  “Bukowski?”

  “yeah?”

  “Bill.”

  “oh, hello, Bill.”

  “what are you doing?”

  “nothing.”

  “what are you doing Saturday night?”

  “I’m tied then.”

  “I wanted you to come over, meet some people.”

  “not this time.”

  “you know, Charley, I am going to get tired of calling.”

  “yeah.”

  “do you still write for that same scurrilous rag?”

  “what?”

  “that hippie paper ...”

  “have you ever read it?”

  “sure. all that protest stuff. you’re wasting your time.”

  “I don’t always write to the paper’s policy.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I thought you had read the paper?”

  “by the way, what have you heard from our mutual friend?”

  “Paul?”

  “yes, Paul.”

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  “you know, he admires your poetry very much.”

  “that’s all right.”