Screams From the Balcony (14 page)

[To Ann Bauman]

January 2, 1964

the wind is blowing singing inside of my head with holy tiger’s feet and also banging the shade and I have pulled down the dirty window, and it’s all over, god, it’s all over, xmas, New Year’s night, and now I feel better, almost as good as they pretended to feel, these hardhearts, these shards, these sharks, and now the woman downstairs beats on the ceiling with the end of a broom handle, my typewriter disturbs her, it punctuates the Javanese exotic head-sounds of her T.V. Well, it is a god damned bad fix, and we go on. Wow. Walking the streets. Drinking coffee. Writing letters to ladies in Sacramento. Another cigarette. A Parliament. Go with cancer. I will be sorry. I will be. I remember reading a book by by…shit, he was one of my favorites, yet I cannot remember his name…yes, Knut Hamsun, book about a nut house and one of the patients, he was called the Suicide, always talking about it, you know, and then one day the building caught on fire and who came crawling laboriously painfully like a snail down the hot rain pipe? Of course, the S.

And this is enough wind for early 64. [* * *]

 

The book of poems here envisioned appeared as
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard
from Literary Times-Cyfoeth in 1965
.

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

January 4, 1964

[* * *] I have been kind of dreaming lately, in spite of
It Catches
, which shows you how we go on like grub, I have been thinking of the 4 books and the stuff I have written; and with these 4 editors I have…I have had no part in the selection, didn’t want to, didn’t trust myself, and yet lately I have been thinking that what the 4 have skipped (much of it) is not only pretty good stuff but maybe my best??? This is a hell of a statement I know. And so I was hoping to get somebody to run these poems in book form; I was going to write a foreword telling a little about how things work, and this is what is left, and god damn you, reader, what do you think? I was going to call the book
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard
, meaning rejected poems, of course. [* * *]

I hear from people on the book, answer them, but without being too much of a prick I try to insert the idea that maybe the creation of
ART
could be more important than my writing letters to them—or anybody writing letters to them. Handholding won’t get it done. 4 walls can teach more about writing than any praise-mongering lying friend or person. I am not Hemingway but even not being Hemingway I never considered writing to Hemingway or asking him anything, or worse: telling him anything. I did, however, consider writing
myself
, and once or twice I did. maybe 3 times. I am a very powerful influence on myself. This happened in Philadelphia and I was not lonely. There is something wrong with me: I am never lonely. It could get that way. I could get doddy. The world can work on you, trick you. The traps. My man Jeffers spoke of this. Beware the g.d. traps…that trapped God

when he

walked on earth.

Those are some pretty good lines. If I can ever learn to write as well as Jeffers I will throw all the apples on my table out of the window and they can have me. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

January 10, 1964

[* * *] Don’t remember writing a long letter but if you got one, fine. Sometimes when there is plenty of beer and cigars and the electric light hits the white paper and the chopper chops and that whore downstairs doesn’t bang on my floor I go on and on, a little cracked, kind of hypnotic, smoke and cold beer and
PAP PAP PAP PAP PAP
, and this, too, is good for what is left of the soul. [* * *]

 

“
Frances” is Frances Smith, who had recently become pregnant with Bukowski’s daughter, Marina
.

 

[To Ann Bauman]

January 23, 1964

Frances says she will write in a couple of days.

Little here. New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski? the bitch!!

Cold here and the life force drags on within, dull, putrid, limping. The job is white light, heat and madness. But then, starvation is a bother, and with either course I feel the coward.

Blighted god damned roaring stinking world.

Cheer up, dear.

the works,

[Unknown Addressee]

January 28, 1964

You knock on my floor when I type within hours. Why in the hell don’t you keep your stupid t.v. set
down
at 10:30 tonight? I don’t complain to managers, but it seems to me that your outlook is very one-sided.

H. Bukowski

Apt. #303

[Reply to Above]

[Sir:

It is not my T.V. set you hear, I don’t have it loud at any time.

I was told you work from 5:30, but your machine is going day night and Sunday. It is like living beneath an arsenal.

This is an apt house not a business establishment. You have had your television on loud until midnight and later. It sounds as if you have all kinds of machinery up there.

You would not be allowed all that noise and racket in any apt house where people live for peace and quiet.

I have been in this house 26 years, and have inquired from many people, and you are out of line.

apt. 203]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

February 5, 1964

Thanks for sending the review. On the review: I don’t think I am “tough” but if the poetry appears that way it is only because they are used to a different content and style. I am more tired than anything and if I refuse to get heated-up over a Sunrise or the blooming of a peony, they think this is tough. Rest of review pretty much on stick, though, and does your printing achievement some justice, and should move some copies. Whoever wrote the article seemed to enjoy the book, and that’s all we want, that, and to get down off the cross.

Sorry on your finances on #4. You put so much time and $$ into book that you smashed yourself, and yet that you got carried on this wave, you must know, is not all loss. What happens to people when they see it, the incredulous wonder and awakening…I am not speaking of the poetry but of the book, the makeup…Frances’ daughter wrote to her and she said when she got book she just held it in her hand for an hour, looking through it, at it, not even reading the poems. It is this awakening of the people with beauty in a world where beauty hardly exists anymore, where we are all too “tough,” this kind of thing, just looking and wondering, it’s still in people, somewhere, but it takes an act like yours to bring it back.

 

“
Purples” were special colophon sheets for a more expensive issue of
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands.
The letter to Tibbs mentioned here is reproduced as an illustration in this volume
.

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

February 7, 1964

[* * * ] I stole 2 excerpts from letter to Ben Tibbs tonight for purples. I hope he does not think me a zero for this. Wrote letter first without thought of anything—then got “purples” on mind. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

February 18, 1964

Mind all clogged with useless things—can’t get straight—but glad book did something for you—but as you know—it’s only the
next
poem that counts, and, then, it hardly counts.

Depressed and jammed-up against small things forever, that’s the way if works. 4 day cold. other scratches.

The book itself is a kind of small miracle to rest against—temporarily.

Looks like you’ve got a good typewriter. Don’t get robbed again.

Mothers are particularly painful because the world has rubbed most of them down to small utterings of inanity. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

March 1, 1964

[* * *] I am getting a little drunk, a good wall to hide behind, the coward’s flag. I remember once in some city in some cheap room, I believe it was St. Louis, yes, a hotel on the corner and the gas fumes of traffic going to work used to come up and choke my sick lazy lungs, and I’d send her out for beer or wine and she was trying to get me straight, trying to mother me or hang me or figure me, as all women will try to do, and she gave me this old bit: “Drinking is only escapism.” Sure, I told her, and thank old red-balled God it is, and when I fuck you, that is escapism too, you may not think it is, to you it might be living, now, let’s have a drink.

I wonder where she is now? A big fat black maid with the fattest biggest most loveliest legs in the universe and ideas about “escapism.” I wonder if she’s thinking of me now, sitting here 20 years later growling about stolen microphones and that the human race is garbage?

Frances pregnant, looks as if I’ll have to move from here, looks like marriage (again) and disorder but hoping for more suave luck and grace to help me this time, I would not hope to be cruel to either woman or child, god give me grace for I am weak and sad and do not feel good, but if any disorder happens…let it be in my life, not theirs. [* * *]

Frances is a good woman, she gets a little snappish and churlish at times but they all do, and I pretend I am asleep or I do not hear and it soon passes over…She kind of has this coffeehouse attitude, appears determined to save and understand all mankind, and this is a kind of obvious and tiring nobility, the other night she fell asleep reading
The People’s World
, and then she goes to a writers’ workshop, which, of course, is kind of obnoxious to me, always has been; but, then, I have my racetracks and beer and my nice beer drinking friends…It all comes out fairly even, depending upon whose head you are looking out of. Like, I imagine the guys who burned Joan of Arc had some strong ideas of why they were doing it. Ah?

I still feel good that Genet liked the book. He is one of the few geniuses of our flat age, moongone stealing immoral unimmortal cheap age. There seems so little; it is like being locked in a tin room that they are heating up and it gets hotter hotter and then you are just finally a flake of black shit. I speak not of death but of the
wearing
qualities of our age, the gross similarities. You can speak with a leader of nations or with a cleaner of spittoons and they will tell you the same things, they will look the same. We need more light than this or it gets too dull or drab to go on. Genet does this. He’s like a flower in a coal pit.

Haydn’s symphony #99 on now. I guess I haven’t heard all of Haydn’s symphonies; I guess few men have. It is good to have workmen like this around. It does damn well get hard to move on now and then, to open a door, to get dressed, to take your clothes to the laundry, to think of a way to get money, to try to sleep, to try to love to listen, everything gets hard, it gets harder, and I will not scream when death comes I will look at it like the little faint green lace vines they spread between flowers of large bouquets, and I will go without damage of transition, like a man taking his dog out to walk.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

March 2, 1964

[* * *] Frances says you should come to Los Angeles but I do not agree. This is one big town full of phonies, as you realize. Arizona has such nice little lizards and horny toads running through the hot sand or sitting on top of big rocks looking at you. You can’t get that here. I remember once walking out of a small Arizona town, the sun came down like magic, all yellow still, I kept going out into the desert, there was nobody around, not a human in sight. I almost didn’t come back. But as you see, I have. [* * *]

By the way, in case you do do the book, I still, at this moment lean to the title
For Regions Lower than Crying
, although I may come up with a later preference, I could go with this one without being hurt too much; the title fits the series of edgy sequence of my titles, makes sense thru the looking glass…. Although I realize this title might bear a first similarity to A. E. Housman’s “Brooks Too Broad for Leaping,” but whereas Housman’s title relates directly to death, the impossibility of escaping it, mine relates to the utter sadness, the almost unbearability of existence. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

March 11, 1964

[* * *] Two people down at the mill think I have cancer. Maybe I am starting to smell? Anyhow, feel god awful weak and only feel good in bed, but probably only the cause of too much drinking and gambling and working at the same time, and down where I am getting it you have to work and sweat and bleed for it, I do mean. The people are half wild with fear and something they know not of; they tremble and jerk with work neurosis, all cackling flat laughter of the deserted innards, and I am beginning to feel that way too; it is contemptuous what we have done to life and the living and ourselves. I was hoping for luck and skill in the gambling to free me but this too appears only another trap where they throw sand on the living. All the traps, and I walk into all the traps, every one that’s there, I spread myself with olive oil and ointment, with hemorrhoid salve and I say
whoops
,
LET’S GO, BABIES
!!!