Screams From the Balcony

  the average person has largely and finally already left the earth, my friend. they generally leave about the age of 5, although some stay a bit longer. tough for you, mother, but you are still here. your letters and poems get better, better, as I shrivel up into bologna-string walking. have you ever seen a bologna-string walking? Death is 2 balls without a head. Death is not being able to possess a good woman because I am dirty from factories and alleys and sluggings and hospitals and marriages and shackjobs, and poor, poor, poor, poor crippled dirt. wine bottles, nights of a steaming light bulb, scribbling on little slips of paper and unable to read them in the morning or at noon or ever.

  death is all this waiting without screaming

  death is bread rotting in the heat

  and 90 million rats and roaches

  death is a sea of piss

  death is a sophisticated afternoon in Santa Fe

  with nobody saying what they are thinking

  maybe it’s the heat, kid, I am really snarling through these thin rented cardboard walls. how much separates me from the loony bin? sometimes down at work I feel like slugging somebody. no hatred, only the zero complex. I want to bust something. sometimes it happens by itself. same thing happened to somebody that happened to me in 53 or 54 or whenever it was. the belly broke open and the blood came out, out, out. he was dead by the time he reached the hospital. the bad life. I whine before I turn out the lights; I pray for spastics and dwarfs, Pal, I pray for scrub women, Pal, I pray for frightened women of some seeming beauty who play their hand and exchange one rich man for a richer man. I pray for the nail that enters the hand that enters the wood, I pray that that nail may not be rusty. Pal.

  a couple of old wrinkled-up women down at work are trying to fuck me. they know that I am whipped. one of them has a young girl’s ass and legs but she must be a thousand years old. “I am getting a new Mustang. will you teach me how to drive?” “I’ll drive you, baby, I’ll drive you!!” “he, hehe, hehehe, that’s what I thought! an’ I want ya ta meet my sister too!” looks like I gotta fuck the whole family. I’ll probably pass. it’s a hairy drippy drizzling game. it’s only when I get drunk that I imagine that I am the lover. what nonsense. and Rupert Brooke wrote better too. but he didn’t have any sense and decided to go to war. and try to be lucky. bullets are built for poets. I knew this one guy, not a bad writer or human being either (sometimes there’s a difference) who said, “But suppose some stupid cocksucker points a machinegun at me and squeezes the trigger?” “if you go, he will.” he went—it happened. m.g. slugs. but they’ll always find an excuse for another war, that’s all right. but they’ll bust you for a little game of pot. or jail a whore for selling her pussy. or blame a homo for being a homo. or fire a man for being 10 minutes late to work. or jail you for being drunk on the streets. or run a woman out of the country for not believing in God (Mad Murray) and saying so and getting them to ban prayer in schools because she figured the kids should have a choice. but War? stockpiles? shit??? why not? listen, I don’t mean to preach here but a little drunk a little tired—up all night at work and then the racetrack today and now almost midnight, no sleep, so the seams ripping a bit.

  something on from the Three Penny Opera. Brecht does not help me too much. I do not trust his melodrama; a god damned horse thief. the social structure bit. I mean, he holds a good hand…

  the little girl runs up and pokes me with her finger. I sit in my shorts. “uts DAT?”

  “dat’s fat.”

  “uts DAT?”

  “dat’s my bellybutton.”

  …because he speaks plainly, that’s a good thing, but he turns it on too much. there are other basics besides a Jewish nose. clarity of delivery can trap you as much as obtuseness because you can kid yourself that you always seem to know what you are saying. (See Hemingway, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings.) but I know a lot of guys down at work who have a plain clarity of delivery and they never say anything.

  tell me, Blaz, do you think the dead get hard-ons?

  do you think the worms and maggots will ever crawl the body of your Love in that closet down there in the dark? what did that fly mean? why did it affect me? why all the sunlight? and the horse standing under the tree? will I live another ten years? [* * *] a siren goes now, ambulance, then fire trucks earlier, the town is on fire, and earlier today coming in from the track I drove thru the Negro section of the x-riots and they were shining their cars and sitting on their steps, they’d had their drunk, and now it was back to it. my god, not a chance for any of us. white or black, living or dying, we are snot, driven helpless snot before a brainless moon of God. seesee, see the Martini Life! the homes in the hills! 14 bathrooms, 17 fireplaces, & 7 great muddy garages while buying 2 more homes over the telephone, one with a winding staircase marvelous like a lighthouse thing for your guests to fall down drunk upon after drinking their own liquor.

  well, 6 more bottles of beer and then to sleep, maybe. [* * *]

  now they play the Blue Danube and I snap the radio off.

  now everybody is here in the kitchen and the whole kitchen is hollering. they talk about making OATMEAL! don’t say that I don’t properly feed these broads.

  so we go on. no death in the road. no Nobel. 5 bottles of beer. a typer that wobbles on 3 legs and wants to kick off. my my. there goes a fly. [* * *]

  I am spreading wall to wall, fat and stupid, hardly feel the pain-translate it mostly, I do, into shots of blue and green light. a formula. I didn’t mean to lay it on you, baby. I remember the bit about (who was it?) Flaubert telling DeMass to keep on clerking, practice on his writing and not to become a journalist. so de Mop clerked and Flub wrung his hands in the light of his (Flaubert’s) fame. sometimes I think it might have been to remove competition? anyhow, DeMop took it out on his rowboat and mad he went because of the siff and mostly because of clerking, although they won’t admit that. [* * * ]

  there is a poet-novelist who said, “Bukowski worries about his soul.” this is too pat of course and puts em in a neat box. but I have packed the meat on my shoulder and have seen the threads come out of statues. I don’t need a soul; all I need is a light bulb, some beer and a chair to sit in. but some want to take that from me. now I have been shipped the poet-novelist’s latest book of poems and I am supposed to review the bit for a mag. I don’t know what to do. it looks very much as if my friend has not worried about his soul. christ, how we snipe! should I shoot him down? we are all a bunch of bitches. dying is often a slow process. why rack a man because his poems have started to fail anymore than rack a man because his eyesight is failing or his teeth falling out or his pecker failing to get hard? we gotta have a winner, what? yet, in another sense, there are some men who sell too easy; one second a man is his brother’s keeper and the next second he is Brutus. [* * *] then too, you might figure it this way: a real man is gonna lose his teeth his hair and his balls long before the soul??? it is confusing. yet I keep looking at faces, I keep watching ways things are done. I’m no Virgin. I’ve rolled and been rolled and yet, in a certain sense, there is just so far that you ought to go, just so much that you should do. I don’t speak of morality and code—that jazz has held the world back too long. I speak of simple things, although I can’t say just what they are but you know them when they come upon you. Genet’s seeming immorality and depravity are nothing of the sort. because he is neither depraved nor immoral toward himself. he does what is proper toward himself. the greatest immorality is going for gold against the grain of yourself when you don’t need the gold, the possession—like taping dead oranges on an orange tree. of course, most of us figure we need some of the gold. there’s always an excuse to die: the wife, the baby, the girlfriends; there is always an excuse to go to the cowardice that most men are naturally inherent to because his father was inherent to it and his father’s father etc. there’s always an excuse to be a prick. it even seems clever. graft. babes with long legs and tights pussies. new cars. then often immorality and immortality lock legs an
d you’ve got jism all over the bed. Oxford. grants. lectures, poetry readings. mouth, mouth, mouth. we are sucked forever into the traps. I’ve always found the face and the ways and the honesty of a ditch digger more alive than any English prof. of course, nowadays even the ditch diggers are getting sophisticated. trouble everywhere. what am I saying? I’ve lost the string. good. good, then. [* * *]

  catch? fine, the critics say that I am non-cerebral. I think the same thing of them. I think that they are patsies to the dupe, playing some kind of con-game, not because I don’t understand their words but because I do. they and Grandma may call it carnal but I call it wet pussy and prostitution. I am as cerebral as any of them (at least so) and if they want to talk about Government or God or Plato or the Meaning of Man, or any of those useless things, have them pour me a couple of glasses of bourbon and I’ll take them up alleys they’ve never seen and roll them out of their minds. Everything is basically simple—especially the critics, especially my critics. and, thus, having unloaded this load of come I move on to other things.

  do you think, my son, that I will ever get a job teaching Creative Writing at the University of Columbia? I would very much like to fuck some young coeds or have them fuck me. [* * *]

  I guess that so many problems come in upon a man that he finally dismisses them all and becomes a rock, the world is full of rocks. but the beer goes down down down. Wagner’s The Ring on now. Wagner goes good with me. Shostakovich. the Russians, the German in the Arts. The French, the English, the Spaniards do me little good. the Italians, halfway. why is it? of course, there’s Knut Hamsun. Norway? wherever the hell. [* * *]

  * * *

  Kirby Congdon was editor of Magazine (New York). A letter from Bukowski appeared in no. 3 (see below).

  [To Tom McNamara]

  October 25, 1965

  [* * *] have you ever met Kirby Congdon? he seems bright enough to set torches to the world. almost seemingly classical, yet lived, and learned, and not to be bullshitted. I understand he is going to Key West or somewhere. there are so many good people I’d like to get drunk with, not so much as to talk myself, but to see them sitting in chairs and talking. Each man seems to come up with something good, something to make me laugh, and they do it so easily and with grace and honesty. Christ I am a pig, Mac, so often so tight, so often so untrusting.

  if I could only realize that right now there are at least 1,000 people on earth better than Christ was; I mean, if Christ was not a fable; I mean, people who don’t do tricks like raising the dead and being glorious and so forth. these people stay hidden. they know that contact means the plague, this is what disgusts me with the Ginsberg/Corso mob. they suck to the human adulation bit and are soon swallowed. Corso died rather quickly because his only mainstay was a simplicity of purpose and some type of message that he thot important. It has taken Ginsberg a little longer, but he is swallowing the same bloody bait—via Behan, via D. Thomas. The woman here is full of words and the child runs around. but I am still insane. She says Thomas drank himself to death because he felt his talent was waning. Bullshit. Thomas drank himself to death for the same reason that I do: he loved his drink, it lifted him where he belonged, where we all belong, where we all should be if the stream of people weren’t such asses and didn’t believe in homes and new cars and all that junk. I have almost died of drink several times, once very close, it was sweet and didn’t matter, and they finally stood me up and walked me out of a door to do it again. fuck em. I am ready to die. I am ready to wilt. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Ann Menebroker]

  [Late October 1965]

  umm, yes, I am a dog, of course & therefore and forevermore and I have not written but you wouldn’t want me to send you a letter that didn’t walk around on the paper…wouldn’t a half-ass babbling be an insult? we all die and are stuffed with standard formality, and, of course, now that I’ve said this, you have a fine springboard to leap upon me with. Christ, that almost sounds sexy! we have to be careful. at least, you have to. anyhow I just got in from Santa Fe, sick, of course, silly and boozed and nowhere further along anywhere. sure, I remember the good old days when you used to ship me a half dozen 50 cent pieces for one of my books, and enclose a trinket or a rose with eyes, sure sure, and I am the same ass. nothing has altered me. I crash through a headful of shoulders and find myself in a marble bathtub with dirt rings, bell rings, blue rings, red rings, the saliva of myself dribbling into lukey water without goldfish, and the world is shot, and I breathe and wait to die, I breathe and wait for November or Rapid Transit or a young girl sitting on bus stop bench with a lot of leg showing. I drink continually and it keeps me going or it kills me and it doesn’t matter, it is all the same. [* * *]

  the old life was very satisfying, of course. Please do not become too relaxed watering plants, baking cookies, putting out the diaper pail to remember the rest. I don’t know exactly what price you are paying for your safety. me, I’m paying a pretty high price for mine and the mirrors turn their backs from me now. I prefer to cover them with towels to spare them the sight of my death. I have joined the walking living dead upon the avenues, in the saloons and everywhere else. but it’s 4 a.m. and the police are driving by and I hear voices outside and we all live very close together here and I am a coward, I am afraid of jails, I hate jails, and so I turn Wagner down a little on the radio, sip my next to last beer and wish you the love of memory and the love of love or whatever there is, dear one.

  * * *

  [To Neeli Cherry]

  [?1965]

  [* * *] I was in a mellow mood (rare for me) when I wrote the intro to Sherman’s stuff, and I felt a little kind and comradely. It is easier to feel that way when Sherman is at a distance. Outside of the poem form I do not much buy his antics. I believe I made this clear in my poem “Letter from the North.” Yet everything I said in the intro to his poems I said out of the truth of myself, whatever truth I could find. It’s a scurvy word anyhow. Actually I do not think J. writes as well as he used to…never fulfilled the early promise and all that hogwash, except maybe with the poem “Montgomery Street” which I think is a great poem, and if a guy can write a poem like this, I will forgive a lot of his nonsense in actual life.

  * * *

  [To Neeli Cherry]

  October 28, 1965

  [* * *] my thanks for the emotive “An Invitation,” good flow here. although the truth factor in some lines disturbs me: “to combat all the yellow-bellies who are sucking us dry. and they are, they are.” “but the only alternative is not to fight, and my god! we couldn’t do that.” sounds like you’ve been hornswoggled. if you really think about it, it is the white-bellies who are sucking you dry. but, then, to have a war it is always best to believe you are the Good guy and the other is the Bad guy. it runs more smoothly. death needs help sometimes.

  then, too, I think you might have written your lines in jest, in satire, and that I missed the point. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To William Want-ling]

  [?1965]

  [***] I keep drinking beer and scotch, pouring it down, like into a great emptiness…I admit that there is some rock stupidity in me that cannot be reached. I keep drinking, drinking, am as sullen as an old bulldog. always this way:—people falling down, off their stools, testing me, and I drink them down, down, down, but really no voice, nothing, I sit I sit like some stupid elf in a pine tree waiting for lightning. when I was 18 I used to win $ 15 or 20 a week at drinking contests and this kept me alive. until they got wise to me. there was one shit, though, called Stinky who always gave me a hard go. I’d outpsyche him sometimes by drinking an extra in between. I used to run with these thieves and we were always drinking in a vacant room, a room for rent, with a low light…we never had a place to stay, but most of these boys were tough, carried guns, but I didn’t, still was square, still am. I thought Stinky had me one night and I looked up and he wasn’t there and I went in to heave and I didn’t even heave, there he was in the bathtub, out out, and I wal
ked out and picked up the money. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To William Want-ling]

  October 30, 1965

  [* * *] It isn’t any secret to myself that I am a rather backward man, lived, baby, but still culling and never sure, always goofed, no answer, and I learn this more and more down at the pits where I work. trying to be one of the boys I will crack wise but it seems to me that I am always topped. christ, the clock is long enough without being topped mentally and spiritually by your fellow-workers. but they always seem to edge me; I get this look of eye and I drop back into silence, once more the defeated asshole, my god. I am always under somebody’s whip. a father. a highschool principal. a fine-looking and lying whore. a bottle. a cigar. a flat tire. rent. a child. rain. constipation. insomnia. a screw at Moyamensing, a trusty in the drunk tank. [* * *]

  and yet we learn. there is a whiner down at work. he cries cries but his crying is like some suckerfish, it is not a clean cry and I have listened to all his strickenness, I have listened to hours to years of his mewking and it has taught me—a good man can learn from a good fool. even a not so good man can learn. what I mean is that we all have extremities of unfulfilled wanting. we are toys to whatever has created us. we will never get there, and even if we get halfway, the ending will be the same: smashed cat’s guts on the boulevard or the last drip of sour blood into the bedpan, hurrah!! I mean