Beerspit Night and Cursing (36 page)

I make love to an onion. I speak to it like a lady. It is pleased and smiles. Rome was yesterday. I wonder.

it will be good to sleep under steep hills.
love,
     
Buk

[
note with a drawing captioned “Death-grip of everywhere—” on other side
] 9-11-62

[
a two-sided postcard—one handwritten, the other typed—dated by SM 11 September 1961, a slip for 1962 since it was probably written the same day as the previous note and refers to Jane Cooney Baker, who had died in January 1962
.]

The comb for you darl.

Wear it in your hair, you will be more beautiful in this fog. She was a strong woman. She would have said yes. All the love I have left, dear. —Buk

my hands behind my back in a land of hell as the mice run

along the walls

and

inside the brain—

shreds.

—B.

6. Oct. 62 S.M. POBX 44 Pacifica Calif

Buk: By now you are aware of the fact that
I REFUSE
to be witnessed by
YOU
.

“dog howl”
etc—you beech. My private life is MY private life & that is why I wont meet you outside of literature. You are a gottamed radio—just because you wear your arsehole on yr sleeve you want us all to go about with our arses out.
NO
thank you.
I PREFER
my privacy! If I was caught off guard enough to tell you that I was stilling my mind’s howl with the oom etc you ought not to have spoken of it—otherwise I wd run off from you. My art is there—I am not there—a gentleman wd see the art—only the old fraud freud wd see the nuts & bolts.

Got a book sent me by you:
Wormwood Review
7
// thanks lots—it is always good to see what those on the bottom are up to in order to prevent my conceit from making the same mistakes.

As usual you are the top of the bottom. But my godtttt. Must you? Must you Bukowski? Be fighting & breaking glass & staining the snow with blood??

Well your virtue is your honesty

The Anglo-saxon looks into the mouth to know the faults.

The Gaelic looks into the eye to know the virtue.

The Negroes look at price tags to learn the value.

The Jews look into the pocketbook to know the worth.

That’s how come big trouble. I see the eye & totally resent having my arse poked about by you Krout Headtss—Oye changed studios because once my address gets out I no longer have any privacy—thus the old phone is out as too many persons knew it—

are you all right??????

Sheri

[
undated note typed at bottom of SM’s previous letter and mailed back to her
]

Dear Sheri:

Art is a private matter, life is not. I, too, desire my solitude. Now that I have a half-fame there are more door-knockers. I don’t want to see them. I never have. But before, when I
Wormwood Review 7
: includes CB’s poem “Thank God for Alleys,” rpt. in
RM
(206).
wouldn’t open the door, I was known as a “nut”, now I am called a “snob”. So goes it with the name-callers and door-knockers.

I am neither “snob” or “nut”. I am burning with whatever burns me, and that is the story.

love,

Buk

L.A. Mid dec. 1962

Deah Sheri

and the body just lays there, and when this sort of thing happens

and the shades flap in front of me now

and my small radio, my red radio plays

and I sit next to a bottle of
MILLER
High Life

and I am hungry and soon I will eat something;

I like to keep things
simple

because that way you don’t get your flapper

tangled in a lot of tinfoil and horseturds.

3 poems and if you do not use them need them

please return in envelope enclosed.

I eat now.

Love,

Buk

L.A. Tuesday 18th. December 1962

Dear Sheri:

Thanks for good letter.

I made the drunk tank Monday morning—must see Judge on Wednesday and he may throw book at me—120 days—it is hard to tell.

I am getting very sick of trouble. Ankle all swollen, may be broken. Also, possible loss of job.

Pray for me, pray the gods to take away some of my trouble.

The world presses against my mind and spirit. A horror. I can hardly go on.

This is a sad letter. Perhaps, if I come through everything, I will write you something a little better.

Love,

Buk

L.A. monday, mid Jan. 1963 [
dated by SM 28 January 1963
]

Dear Sheri:

My thanks for returning the poems. I had forgotten them, and as you know, I do not keep carbons. Looking at these old poems, tho, I’d say they were too involved and I’m glad I’ve dropped a lot of the clutter. The way I write now may not be the best for
THEM
but it’s best for me and I’m the one who’s hemmed in with the wallpaper.

Pearson sounds pretty much like a University and that’s to be expected. The idea that a poem must have a certain “charge” is an old one, and is no more relevant than the fact that a streetcar should be 69 feet long. I cannot be bothered with poem-rules, as outside this door they fuck me up pretty well with their jails and ways and traps, and so I make the poem mine—any way I want it.

As to writing
a novel
, if I live to be 60 (which is doubtful)
I MIGHT
try a novel. Then I will be wide enough—if a little thinned out. Right now, I don’t want to waste the paper.

You are going to have a good chance to hate my guts. Webb giving me a big spread in upcoming
Outsider
#3: photos, excerpts from letters, words from editors, a few poems and so forth. I have been named
The Outsider of the Year
, and I think, even my picture on cover. On top of this, he’s bringing out a selection,
a book of my poems
1955-1963. The gods have me up for test: if I snivel or look at my bellybutton in this limelight, I am finished.

William Corrington writes me that he has heard from you in regards to one of his poems. You prob. did not know that I know Willie, and regard him as one of the better living writers of our age. There are some holes to fill where Ernie and Robinson J. and E.E. left, plus Faulkner, and Willie might do it, big order or not. He is a good man to begin with and has the talent too. These 2 factors do not always run together.

I hope that whatever pressure is upon you lifts. I will put a hex upon all lambasters, detractors and noisemakers, gloom purveyors, takers of time, pricks, fools, and so forth. Consider yourself in the clear for a while…if I have any pull with the heavens.

Now, princess, be good, sit still, very still, sense the air and the hours and the crawling of ants…and soon all will be clear.

LOVE
,

Buk

Lost acres of hell called L.A.

Feb. ten? 1:11 p.m., afternoon, some sun up, water running downstairs, ladder on grass 3 floors down, woman walking in brown skirt and mauve blouse, suddenly turns and walks back toward corner,
Frost is dead
but Frost was always dead, and my red radio gives me a piano that is not too interesting…

deer Sheereeeie…

you may feel free this evening and maybe an afternoon or 2 until it rubs off. The message today being mainly

TO THINK OF RAINPIPES HANGING TO THE SIDES OF DRY HOUSES EVERYWHERE
, and this will do it, this will free you, and you may think I am bullshitting you and I may be to an extent, on the other hand I am not…because I never will or ever quite say anything I do not mean, and in essence it is mainly in thinking of a stone or a frog that the rays of the long-toothed gods are deflected
FROM YOUR MIND TO THE STONE OR G.D. FROG
, or, as I would suggest today: rainpipes. The rays bounce upon you and off of you and cannot be taken because you are thinking rainpipes and the rainpipes take the knife and since they are dead (or seemingly dead) we get the edge on the game. Please do not think I am insane. In simpler terms this is called physchology, but in physchology they become lost in words and phrases until they no longer no what the hell they damn well are doing. Now, enough of that.

My thanks for your drawing of Sheereeie, you good baby, and now the sun is coming up bolder and the snails and plants climb up toward their death, and the bad piano is gone from my red radio and I lift my cold yellow beer like a golden heart and drink.

You are right: the Webb thing is only fateful to suckers who buy their own shadows. I will outluck—with guts and calmness—a few flashlight flickers. If you want a copy of me dancing the fandago before the admiring eyes of the imps, let me know and I will mail. Will be out in week or 2, and when you see you will know the inherent dangers of fathead involved. I have been a very lucky man in that they have allowed me to live quietly and unbothered and I have carved small chips as it pleased me to carve. I intend to go on doing this.

Corrington I will have a word with. He is a good man of honor but perhaps…careless…because his mind…being fairly young…is turning quickly, and he is drawn into too many corners and cannot cover them all. He must perhaps…be told a little…not too much, for he is grieviously clean and unusual, albeit slack, at times, when he should be taut. It takes many
bricks and many years and many knives and many nights. We draw into our moulds slowly and most of our moulds are misshapen.

You’ve got to forgive Pearson. He is honed into a kind of logic by learning out of other men. This is called education. Take a good education and a good mind and you get a pretty good sort of man. If he thinks poetry should be thematic instead of dramatic (essentially, that is) that is only his loss because of learning. Poetry is anything I care to make it. This is my pleasure and my way of walking. Changes are wrought out of climbing. I don’t give a nickel’s hedgehog’s belly of a damn whether my changes are accepted, only I know I’ve got to go this way or I will be sicker than I am now, and it has been tough lately, twice this week my horse has thrown the jock at the gate…once with a beautiful long-legged grey called
Triumph V.
and agin wit something I don’t recall. They are tearing up the streets now and a crippled climbs out of the side of his little celluloid machine and stares up at me.

Death is a bug. I am ready for death. I will take it into my arms like any whore. What can it do that it has not already done?

Maybe you laugh. I went to organic foods down there at place you told me. 4 or 5 months ago. But food all dried up. Carrots dry and rotting, celery brown, everything sitting there. Not fresh. Freaks walking around, poking. Either real old people or young health faddists, idiots with bulging ugly muscles, or homosexuals, bad dream day there, did not feel well, threw things into my basket,
WANTING OUT
, got home, threw in refrig., forgot, never ate the lettuce, the celery, carrots, etc., forgot and later threw in garbage—maybe would
not
have, if I had oh only not seen those
PEOPLE
in there, did not want oh to
BECOME
those people, those homos, those muscles, those aging wrinkled things, tho I did eat the
RADISHES AND THEY WERE GOOD
, they tasted like radishes, sharp and true, tang, and that might have been worth the whole trip. But actually there is something very shabby and depressing about the store and I figured it is better for me to eat badly and drink badly than to suffer going in there.

Now the sun has gone away and a blue car comes down the street like nothing and I am suddenly cold and old, be 43 in August, but often feel more like 24 or onehundred and four at
same time, and red radio has fairly jazzy but not too deep tune from musical comedy and I pause and

o sweet christ sleep

1, 3, 2, hours

everything gone past

and I will be like an old carrot
stretched out in a rack in a health food store,

and they will yawn

and walk
    past.

    love, love, love,

Buk

[
postcard dated by SM 23 February 1963
]

Dear Sheri:

Feeling much better now. Hope C[orrington]. has written.

Cosmic warheads have moved off.
Even wrote a poem—bad one—the other night. Got in new supply of vitamins, beer and comic aspecti.

The poppies grow and nod like devils and the flies look for webs.

L.,

Buk

Los Angeles Feb. 26, 1963

Dear Sheri:

Got your last good letter, and have been sometime getting around to this…a couple of weeks of drinking, ya know, and it ripped me up. Now just tired old man looking out of a window. Some bleeding and torn parts but believe I will mend.

I appear to make my own hexes.

Would not advise attaching yourself to 6 acre lot wit attendant hoorors—as notated in yr last—but this is your business. I could not do it. I would be wacky within a week, or wackier.

Yes, god, I know the
ART FILM
. The broken statues, arms shooting out of sofabacks from springs, men walking through mirrors, white-bellied jackasses painting with their shirts off, people trying to
QUEERLY ACT SENSITIVE
…The art film. I saw a couple in the Village and came away sicker than this drunk I am coming off now. No sunlight could clean that ill away. Now I just look out my window and the sun comes in with the dull sounds of the city, I hear an airplane, I even hear some god damned birds, and I mend. I will live. But I am only allowing to mend what
I TORE
with a weapon they gave me (the bottle), but when I walk into one of their weapons (the art film) or one of their crowds or faces or looks or factories, it does not mend so easy because it is done mostly without my o.k.—like getting hit by a car. Somebody wrote me, a
Sacramento woman
with 2 children and an unhappy life, her motto is now: “Forgive them, for they know
WHAT
they do.” Which is astute enough. But I don’t think of forgiving or
not
forgiving. I just want to
AVOID
them. Which is not easy. So we make it,
AVOID
them as much as
POSSIBLE
. I have seen enough of the mob to draw conclusions from and about them for 10,000 years. That’s why solitude is easy for me and graceful. I know that there is nothing out there in that light and sound that can help me, I mean a human help. The roads are good, the side of a hill, a bridge, I even like to look at the buildings they live in. But to search out in that mass of flesh for either love or reason is senseless.

I bade Corrington write you, and you should have heard by now.

This letter is somewhat like myself today: a soft probing and mending. Not much energy. Compared to yours, nothing. You are lit by enough flames to burn us all…Webb writes
Outsider
3 out next week. Which means 2 weeks. I will mail you a copy.

Pound read in order to find out
WHAT NOT
to write. Not the subject matter but the matter of approaching the subject matter. He read too much: this is a hammer upon the mind. All this work is done for one by his contemporaries. By reading them, one gleans
ALL OF WHAT NOT TO DO
. And it doesn’t take much reading, for they all write alike. Things are quite easy. When they tell you, “you are writing badly”, then you know that you are writing
well
, for you are not writing as
THEM
. Grass is them, and although the ego is often sick, nobody wants to be grass: we will be under it soon enough.

LOVE,

Buk

Wed. night April 17, 1963 11:10 p.m.

Hello Mama Sheri:—

good u are not pissed and only suffering the cruxifiction bit, which is bad enough, only when we stop getting nailed

and become agreeable to the ways of the bastard masses

then, baby, we’re done.

You know this.

Why you keep sending my stuff to Pearson? I want you to have it. You are more than Pearson.

When you coming to see me?
I will keep you out of letter or verse or spoken word. If that’s what you want. I have good honor.

Webb writes my book has good advance sales—Director of
Metropolitan Museum of Art ordered a copy. I am getting into high places with my crap. They are probably bored with safety. Good, good.

[
typewritten note with large drawing dated 5 July 1963
]

Dear Sheri:

As much as you can believe me, I must tell you that the old shadows are dead, not forever, but for our lives for a certainty, and that the essence and the flower and the fire are only felt by those mostly…alive…now.

sad, yes, also,

Buk

p.s.—Love, Bukowski

[
at top are mock Chinese ideograms and, in formal letterhead style
, “Chinese Slave’s Association of East Los Angeles”;
undated, but written shortly after preceding letter
.]

Sherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryie:

don’t like to talk in riddles but I guess what I meant drunk when I said “old shadows are dead”, I was ref. to communication between people who once had communication, and essentially
HARDNESS
takes place in one individual who either feels over-worldly or bored with it or sick of it or taken up with something else and then the flower dies. But all this is nec. of course: one flower must die so that another may grow. So much is always nec. and I grow sad among the necessaries.

There is a horse called Yin and Yang.

My collection of poems via Webber will be out about Sept. first, and I have seen the dummy copy, and even without the poems the book would be worth 2$ because of the paper and the way he’s hung it together, the design, the love, the taste of good steak and avacado, he has put his gut into the work and it is like a bell ringing or water running or stretching out on the bed and looking up at the ceiling. When Madison Ave. sees what a poor man can do with nothing they are going to learn that magic does not grow at request; it must be thought about and prayed and gambled toward.