I walked past and out. I mean, it doesn’t mean anything except that these babies are all sucked out and I don’t like to talk to them or even look at them, especially near the end of the night. [* * *]
* * *
The book of poems announced here was ultimately published not by Mad Virgin Press but by Poetry X/Change, Glendale, California. It did not appear in print until 1968. The book of “mostly drawings” was never published.
[To Tom McNamara]
May 20, 1965
strike for freedom of time to have a look around. they have caught me. it’s a sad and silly story of doing-in but the main thing is they’ve got me. 8 years on the same job and just as broke as if I were not working. Of course, the first years were the slippery days when they had a hard time finding me; when I could sit and watch the smoke rise from my cigarette while men were killing each other. and men continue to kill each other and themselves and they’ve cut a lot of woodwork and a pile of soul from me. there are a hell of a lot of ways to die but I still have a finger on the ledge, I think.
something called THE MAD VIRGIN PRESS wants to do a book of my poems and I don’t know if it will be mimeo or what and I don’t care. they say ten percent, and I can always use a little beer money. I think I have a title—Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window. I will try it on them and see what they say. Then Border Press is going to come out with a book of mine, mostly drawings interspersed with poems, but I haven’t done the thing yet, but will. I like to play with india ink and lots of white paper. I tried some oils one time but what a strain—like going for the 3rd piece of ass. so what I mean, here I am sagged and dying but still fumbling with poems and drawings, and it’s a way of going on—like the whiskey and the horses and sleep sleep sleep, if I can get it.
this is an indrawn and particularly kind of cotton and waiting time, faucet dripping, something on the radio 200 years old, the teeth falling out of my head, horns honking, children pissing down their legs in a May afternoon, and below us pipes underground passing the shit to the sea, and the morgues stuffed, men in stained neckties selling ass, more books on Kennedy, myself barely feeling it out—the flailing, the words, the trees, the whores, the ways, Time battering like a tough fullback &, Ace, I do not mean the magazine. smoking cigars and dreaming of Mata Hari. ducking under sparrow droppings. I saw a lizard yesterday. also read a quotation by E. E. Cummings in the newspaper yesterday that I didn’t like. all in all, you gotta figure a newspaper is a bad buy because it can make you terribly unhappy and you even have to pay a dime to get that way. Berlioz. somebody writes and asks if I want to read somewhere. I have to tell him no. it’s true I don’t want to. snails don’t do much for me. I have these pains in my shoulders, neck, back, and I walk as if I were mortar. topside. only the tigerlegs kid with the moth-soul. when it rains I cry like Mortons’ salt.
you keep it going. we all end as turds yet let’s make them WORK for it.
the Spanish troops passed down the streets today their bayonets like whitened teeth and I burned the tablecloth, a picture of Herbert Hoover and a crossword puzzle of Asia. [* * *]
* * *
[To Ann Menebroker]
[May 27,] 1965
[* * *] yes, the phone call time was a good time and an odd time, a very odd time, and I am always very close to leaping but then was a very most close time, and I’ll always remember your clear and water-cool voice, you voice sheen blue and easy and clean saying “hello, Buk.” once when I had just gotten out of jail, had just opened the door—the phone rang—“hello, Buk.” It was very good.
and now I get up like an elephant of a man, I have been drinking beer, I am going to piss, gross, gross.
the life hangs with us. it’s not easy. you and I, we work with words but the words are like bricks stones turds clay turtle shells fucked out by sand, what have you? I can’t be generous with myself. I’ve felt better giving a bum 25 cents, I’ve felt better being a bum sleeping on a park bench with my youth yowling over my angry and demented bones than I ever have felt writing a poem. what is it? nothing can please us. we are in a somewhat fine cage. you know this. christ is not the only bastard who was ever nailed to the wood. or bastardess. I include you in. I think as time goes on, the female more and more is beginning to inherit the reality and knowingness of our state of being—which is sadly almost zero. but please keep writing your poems. I think it is something about our Age—that men no longer speak so very well. they are frightened to show any more than muscle. ugg. muscle, I have. but muscle isn’t going to show us through the bomb or through ourselves. I don’t mean to intend a religious yammering or fear of fire. I think if D. H. Lawrence were here now he’d sense some of this—what I would call “unmanliness,” shits, look, it goes up and down but if we want to save it it’s going to take all humans to save it, and if it’s not worth saving (and maybe that’s it?) nothing will save it. [* * *]
* * *
[To Tom McNamara]
Late May [1965]
got the Journal Unamerican and enclosed buck for next 5 issues. this pb. just zany enough to bug-gas us all. comic strip best of all—“Mr. Hurts,” my god!
you didn’t let me know you were starting a mag. I will make some attempt to submit but am pretty burned-out after hurling together Crucifix. look, if you tell Webb-1109 Royal St., New Orleans…or Lyle Stuart 239 Park Ave South, New York, 3—you are going to review the book, I’m sure you’ll get a copy. Or why don’t you walk in on Stuart, wave this letter at him and tell him you are the editor of The Journal Un/American and emanon and demand a copy of Crucifix. this would be much more dramatic! Stuart runs a pretty good liberal paper himself.
this is late may 1965 and I have not yet killed myself although I fell down drunk in the bathroom last night and vomited over myself, I, Charles Bukowski, mad poet, fuck, and asshole. I was once married to this millionairess who had to let me go mainly because she couldn’t understand me. “You’re always laughing at yourself, demeaning yourself. I like a man who likes himself.” well, that’s all right too, only we are all crazy in our different ways.
working into the 2nd 6 pack now and a pint of CUTTY sits on the shelf. I intended to go to work tonight but this woman and child don’t seem to be worrying about $ or rent or survival so why in the hell should I? sometimes it’s just not the night to go in and if you do go in that night you are dead, you know what I mean. our man Blazek having money trouble now, and how any of us survive—what sweet hell, what a going on! my trouble is that I don’t know how to do anything but get drunk and write poems, and often the poems are not what they should be. can I hand the landlord a poem for the rent? I’m fucked, we’re all fucked, we don’t stand a chance. I might get some green with a novel but I still don’t feel like writing a novel, may never write one, and so there goes that. It’s terrible just to try to stay alive and not quite know why. just to eat a little and wipe the ass and stare at a lightbulb. the gophers and worms are foxy;—they stand in line with my last rejection.
Steve Richmond says he gets letters from you. what ya trying to do, Mac?—wake us all up?
* * *
[To Al Purdy]
Late May, 1965
I do not write too often because I do want to keep it easy and not let it be a drag. I am engaged in writing several young literary fellows right now and my balls are dragging. you know—everything’s new to them: life’s a drag, life’s horror, life’s anything but writing a poem; life’s more like talking about writing a poem and clutching hands. well, shit, maybe I am a little hard on the boys, and some of their letters are good but it does become a merry-go-round. [* * *]
some kid in New Orleans tells me you wrote him a personal note and said you’d send your Horse on into him. you don’t know what this means to the kids, al. it can keep them going a couple of years, it can keep the factories and the whores from killing them. but I guess it’ll get them anyway. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
Sometime, 1
965
oh my god blaz, I write you because I believe you are the only person who’ll understand but the agony is almost too much it’s standing on all four legs—my god my god, there I go, being literary—I want to kill myself so badly but there is no suitable instrument so I keep drinking and wishing—a gun a gun a god damned sweet GUN—wham!—it’s over. I mean, baby, I am sitting here with a toothache that is reaming the life out of me, and it’s not just the pain, it’s everything, it’s this pain on top of all the pains!!—I was writing a poem last night and what happen? I am perfectly content drinking, pounding out my silliness, and then what the shit??? the landlady comes down and she and her husband want to get drunk with me again, they get their kicks that way, I say things that bring them to life, fine, fine, and so I chop the head off the poem and go on down there, and I know what it’s going to be, he puts on his recording of Oklahoma and we all sing, me with a forged frog in my throat, and I say, look, don’t you have Guys and Dolls? I am a guys and dolls man, I am a loser from way back, I like to hear them songs. of course, he don’t got Guys and Dolls he got Oklahoma so we sing Oklahoma until the very tired frog dies and swims in my dead brain. so the old lady finally comes down with the kid and I’ve got an excuse to leave. o.k., so I wake up this morning with this tooth reaming the shit out of me, it still is, sweet baby, but somehow writing you it seems like you can feel my fucking pain and that makes it less. I almost laugh & sometimes I think you are the only living American human being, Blaz I’m nothing, all the poetry I’ve written is swill, I hurt all over, and it’s just not the tooth. now fucking rain dripping down like hemorrhage of my brain and my elbows and knees busted and bloody now from falling down in the streets gaging plunging 2 nights ago, naked albatross of hell, me, falling again and again, until all blood blood, nose blood toes blood, I don’t understand anything, anything, look look, now I wake up this morning and I ask the woman, I tell the woman, OH MOTHER OF GOD THIS TOOTH IS FUCKING THE SHIT OUT OF ME!! I NEVER KNEW PAIN COULD BE SO PAINFUL AND SO CONSTANT!! (I should have remembered from other bad days) and I said look, do we have any aspirin or anything around??
and you know what she said Blaz?
in a yawning imbecile voice, she said,
“ah don’t know…”
“what the fuck do you know?” I asked her quietly. but it was no good. she was asleep again, snoring, vacant, vacant, unfeeling, waiting for her next session of the poetry workshop to come her alive and make her jabber her silly shit jabber.
so here I sit now, in the hands of round blue purple pain mashing the beer in, and I’m quite a solitary, I take it mostly alone like this, but for once I wish you were here, I wish a human were here, I’d like to hear you say, “Shit, Buk, I’m sorry you feel bad.” that’s all I’d need to hear—then the pain couldn’t do anything. [* * *]
oh my god, and just earlier a terrible happening. I am bitter and yapping a bit about the pain the good God has sent me and the woman goes in to the bathroom she says sleepily
“I think I have some Numz-it in here.”
fine. I let her flounder around in there, then many minutes go by and I get nervous, I am kind of on the cross you understand, a kind of bad situation, and I go in there and there she is sitting on the can, so I walk out. I give her more time. then I see her rise and go to the medicine cabinet. she hasn’t even bothered to flush. she doesn’t know where the hell she is. I reach over and flush the toilet for her, then I stand there and watch her staring into the medicine cabinet. I’ve got patience. I wait 5 minutes, 10. I try to outwait her. she’s either too stupid or too shit clever for me. I’ve told her 3 or 4 times that she is insane. but I don’t think this is true. she is simply dead, dead, dead, dead, and she will always be dead but I don’t quite want to let myself believe it because I must live with her because of the child and the child is a very beautiful child, and it’s the musts that kill us…forever.
finally I can’t stand her bland vacant stare into the medicine cabinet any longer. “Jesus, forget it!” I tell her. “forget the whole god damned thing!”
she walks out into the other room. in 30 seconds she is asleep snoring like a Canadian woodsman. yet I understand from her writings and her mouth and her many liberal and educated friends, that she really wants to help the human race, that she is looking toward a better world, that the problem of the Negro should be solved, that, after all, with proper planning and govt. we could all have all that we need. and being in need I look at her and she snores snores snores…and I might as well be dead.
love has got to have another name; the people who use the word shouldn’t. love begins an inch at a time; in slogans or brandished across a universe, it doesn’t work. you’ll see. this is the failure of Communism—the theory is proper; there just aren’t enough human beings around to work it. people continue to shit upon themselves and scream for theory, when anywhere anyday anytime the smallest kindest touch falling like a raindrop can start the whole thing going. but it’s just not in them. and here I might make you angry—for I say it’s in me, I feel it running up and down my arms, like cool moonlight, I am ready to begin, but they continue to be nasty, to fall asleep across the body of my pain. so fuck it, finally, and fuck them—they want me on the cross and they won’t get it. I have the great secret that they do not have: you needn’t wait on death; you can call the day and the moment.
I am a loner, Blaz, and it’s too bad for you are one of the few men I could ever feel contact with, and it’s too bad I’m not in Illinois or you’re not in Chicago but poverty our few talents keep us apart otherwise I would slug it out on the front lawn with you after 50 beers and show you that 20 years difference in age is not a begging for a lack of guts. yet guts to go on living or guts to kill yourself—it’s the asshole same thing, and if you ever get word that I did it across the kitchen table, I’ll know that you knew and that the choice was clean, a clean sweep, a shit goodbye, and an asking for more nothing—just a changing of the same dirty drawers. all right? all right.
I think mostly of continents of men like ants going nowhere not wanting too much not caring, fucking stealing writing bad stuff eating and living bad stuff all the horrible kitchens of unliving women bringing us our badly cooked meals to our badly worked bodies until we go mad or until we go simple and believe that the whole thing makes sense.
the tooth is banging away, it will not give up. wait I know the place of an old cigar like a bragging beautiful white kitten in a toy box in heaven. I found it. reams of blue smoke across this kitchen. a ltter a letter to Blaaesake. blaz.
yes, I am drunk and terrible and the ladies come out of the church and I want to fuck them all it is Sunday and the ladies come out of the church and I want to make them come in their red and green and yellow dresses. my tooth is killing me yet the leaves of the plant outside this window say hello hello
but I want to make all the women come
and they walk past my window
big and bold and insane and daring
in color and wobble
30 feet high on spikes
CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK CLACK
asking for it
and if a man gives it to them he gets 5 years in jail
for rape. it doesn’t make
sense. [* * *]
* * *
Blazek’s Mimeo Press had published William Want-ling’s Down, off & out.
[To Douglas Blazek]
[June 2, 1965]
[* * *] this is now the best part—woman and 8 month old child gone to attend a poetry session weekly one a night somewhere and I sit here opening more beers and writing to somebody I have never seen and the kitchen light comes down and my fingers smack like drunk spiders on the keys and I don’t know what is next on the page, except same old alphabet of scrambled eggs of me trying to worm-out, attend, sing, pray, bullshit…meanwhile, thanks for the Want-ling, well-done—you give mimeo a live and foodish red-meat look that others fail to do. like me go get the Want-ling and check on the beer. also have a
pint of scotch after I run through these 12 ½ quarts, so it figures to be a burning and perhaps ugly night, but maybe easy enough. wait. my good god, she’s put it away somewhere. I could look but it would take hours and by then too drunk to write. some of the poems went, or almost went for me. but I always got the feeling as if I were being kidded a bit—like the con with the tray under his shirt—but didn’t mind that too much; writing was clear and contained little poetic malarkey. on the capital punishment essay, I felt it began well when he spoke of society in the all-over scope but when he began to get down to his knitting he got drab, academic and wrote badly. the all-over book was good reading, tho, except is it nec. for poet to place month and year below each poem? isn’t this too precious? sometimes I think it is better to wonder when you did write the things, or, if you did. why pull at threads, tho, when the world is falling cesspool fat into its glory turds? I shouldn’t complain about dates at poem-bottoms; getting older, cranky. fits. Dreams of Miles Standish. fear of somebody smelling my dirty underwear.
I hope that you are still alive, I hope that I am not now speaking to the top of a coffin lid. there was a bar I once sat in for 5 years. maybe I told you. the early barkeep, Jim, used to let me in 5 a.m., 2 hours early and I’d watch him mop and clean up and we’d talk quiet and easy and drink free, and then they’d swing in at 7 a.m. and I’d watch them come and go, the lesbians, the whores, the dim-minds, the canned-heat drinkers, the office-workers, but nobody to STAY, I was the only one who stayed and it worked into my mind that if I could just get onto that stool each 5 a.m. somewhere somehow there, I wouldn’t be too much touched by the asshole war of the world, and it was a strange and necessary time: many hours of not-talking, staring at the barwood, watching the sun come up and go down, of listening to them laugh and fight, and knowing that I, myself, would never have the strength to go anywhere, do anything want anything, just another beer, and watching somebody’s head turn on a neck, watching the wrinkles in the neck, watching the head turn in the collar, maybe thinking, idly, DOESN’T HE FEEL THE HELL OFEVERYTHING? ARE THEY ALL BRAVER THAN I AM? ALL OF THEM??? there was nothing to do but manage to get drunk every night without money. this was due mainly to the fact that I could drink enormous quantities of all types of drinks for hours hours hours without becoming intoxicated—at least not in their sense. I could feel things running up and down inside myself but I needed it so badly, so much more of it, that even all they gave me was sad, it didn’t work, and this goaded them on and the drinks came and I slugged them down blank-faced and waved a thanks each time, never forgetting to do this. since I never ate, I needed the nourishment. I went down from 190 to 131. I was the joke, the discard, the madman. the night bartender used to fight me at his leisure when he needed a scarecrow to slap around and wanted to impress the ladies. I took him one night; after 50 beatings I had finally had enough; what happened, I don’t know, except I stayed out of the bar that day and drank muscatel and ate boiled potatoes and rye bread, and they pulled me off of him and broads sat round him and said “o, poor, tommy, poor poor, tommy…” and he fucked them all later but then he just sat there holding his head and the broads wiped him with their hankies and I sat there and I hollered out, HEY: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS: I WANT A DRINK! and the relief bartender came down and leaned close and said, “I’m sorry, sir, we can’t serve you.” and I walked out.